President Donald Trump has directed the Pentagon to prepare a sweeping plan within 60 days on how to defend the American homeland against attacks from Russian and Chinese missiles and other aerial threats.
Dubbed “Iron Dome for America,” the initiative is outlined in an Executive Order issued on Jan. 27. The directive calls for a comprehensive air and missile defense strategy, with a heavy emphasis on space-based interceptors that could knock out attacking intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“The threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks, remains the most catastrophic threat facing the United States,” the order states. “President Ronald Reagan endeavored to build an effective defense against nuclear attacks, and while this program resulted in many technological advances, it was canceled before its goal could be realized.”
Experts outside the government said the White House’s push puts new weight behind needed missile defense efforts, with an emphasis on the quick development of a plan for a future missile defense architecture and a roadmap for how to develop and deploy it.
“There is an emphasis on a full spectrum of threats and I think that’s appropriate,” said Tom Karako, an air and missile defense expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “… It’s not like it’s technologically infeasible. It just requires effort.”
Trump’s order does not say what new funds might be devoted to the efforts but stipulates that the plan needs to be in hand before the budget for fiscal 2026 is prepared.
Key to the effort will be the Space Force. The plan calls for a boost in the Space Development Agency’s “Custody Layer.” It is part of the effort of Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, in which SDA plans to field hundreds of satellites that can also transfer data and facilitate navigation, with plans for additional capabilities.
“You may have a sensor that only sees a portion of the trajectory, and what you want to be able to do is hand off the tracking,” explained Charles Galbreath, a retired Space Force colonel who is now a senior fellow at AFA’s Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
“The ability to maintain custody through different phenomenology and across different regions of the glide path is absolutely critical to supporting the multi-layered missile defense approach that the executive order is advocating for,” Galbreath said.
The Trump administration plan also calls for the fielding of Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor satellites (HBTSS), another project well underway that is designed to be integrated with the SDA’s custody layer of satellites. HBTSS is a collaboration between the Missile Defense Agency and the Space Force.
The plan also calls for the development of a variety of kinetic and nonkinetic capabilities to take out missiles and other threats in multiple phases of flight. Notably, the plan floats “the development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept” of missiles.
“It takes it a step further to say we’re not just going to track them, we’re going defend against them in every way possible—at least he’s directing to study and review it and make recommendations,” Galbreath said.
Trump’s concept recalls President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which Reagan said would seek to render “nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.” That expansive goal was never realized. The limited missile defense the U.S. currently maintains is intended to block a North Korean attack and is not capable of thwarting a Russian or Chinese strike that involves a large number of missiles.
Trump’s call for space-based interceptors has brought attention to a sensitive issue that is not generally discussed in such blunt terms.
In recent years, the Space Force has begun to argue space is no longer a benign environment but a “warfighting domain.” The service has crept ever closer to openly acknowledging it will need weapons of some sort—at least of a defensive nature—in space, increasingly referring to “counter-space” capabilities and “space fires” in recent years.
“This is the year where we need to have a conversation about that. The world has changed. Technology has changed,” Karako said. “The implications of space as a warfighting domain have begun to sink in, and as they do, we are going to see the multiplicity of kinetic and nonkinetic space fires.”