Trump aims to finish what Reagan started, a missile defense system for the U.S.

Just hours after Pete Hegseth was sworn in as the country's Defense secretary, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Pentagon to begin the process of implementing a “next-generation missile defense” system for the U.S. aiming to complete the comprehensive project originally envisioned by President Reagan at the height of the Cold War. 

Trump dubbed the missile defense system – which the order says would be designed to protect the U.S. homeland from ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other new aerial threats – the "U.S. Iron Dome" after the highly successful Israeli conventional missile defense system.

The executive order explicitly notes that the policy aims to achieve what was left unfinished by Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative – which critics dubbed "Star Wars" after the 1977 pop-culture film of that name – which endeavored to create a space-based defense shield against Soviet missiles. Ultimately the intuitive fizzled out as scientists estimated the technology wouldn’t be ready for decades and the end of the Cold War reduced the urgency of the threat. 

But now, the old Soviet Union superpower has been replaced by China and Russia, which possess sizable nuclear arsenals and are currently in stiff competition with the United States.  

The Trump administration in the order specifically identified the threats from these “peer and near-peer adversaries” as the primary driver of a comprehensive missile defense system, which marks a major shift in policy documents from the first Trump, then Biden administration, which focused on using missile defense technologies to prevent attacks from smaller threats, namely North Korea and Iran.  

“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 executive order reads.

It continues, “Over the past 40 years, rather than lessening, the threat from next-generation strategic weapons has become more intense and complex with the development by peer and near-peer adversaries of next-generation delivery systems and their own homeland integrated air and missile defense capabilities.” 

The shift to focus on the nuclear threats posed by China and Russia comes as both countries have developed more advanced weapons and have expanded their arsenals while also becoming close partners. This presents a hard problem for the U.S. to solve with the traditional nuclear deterrence doctrine that endured until the previous Biden administration.  

“During the Cold War the United States had one nuclear peer to deter, the United States now faces two – Russia and China. This is a much harder problem and the United States has to make big adaptations to the programs we have to deter both countries simultaneously,” Rebeccah Heinrichs, senior fellow and director of the Keystone Defense Initiative at the Hudson Institute, told Just the News. 

“We must outsmart and out-innovate China in particular and no area is more important than in the protection of the American homeland. Both of those actors, plus North Korea (and Iran is a threshold nuclear state with a space launch program that could be leveraged for a long-range missile program) could coerce the United States with ballistic or cruise missiles if they believe the United States is vulnerable to them,” Heinrichs also said. 

She continued, “By building a layered homeland missile defense system, the United States complicates the adversaries’ calculations and makes it harder for them to plan an attack on the United States with even a handful of missiles.” 

President Trump, appearing to recognize the need for modernization and new ways of deterring attacks from adversaries, directs the Pentagon in the executive order to develop a plan within 60 days for implementing the “next-generation missile shield.” 

The requirements outlined by the executive order are sweeping. 

The plans are to include defense-against-missile systems, the deployment of tracking lasers, development of space-based interceptors, development of new methods to intercept threats pre-launch and securing the supply chains for these new defense systems. 

This marks a major shift from the policy of the Biden administration, which in its 2022 National Defense Strategy unequivocally stated that the United States' existing missile defense systems “neither intended for, nor capable of, defeating large and sophisticated ICBM, air-, or sea-launched ballistic missile threats from Russia and the PRC.” 

The 2017 National Security Strategy promulgated by the first Trump administration also made clear that missile defense was not geared toward China and Russia. While calling for an enhanced missile defense system, it noted that it is “not intended to undermine strategic stability or disrupt longstanding strategic relationships with Russia or China.” 

Missile defense, which is not part of the traditional U.S. nuclear doctrine, has seen renewed interest as the nuclear arsenals and capabilities of China and Russia have grown in recent years. 

China, which emerged from the Cold War with a small nuclear arsenal compared to those of Russia and the United States, is expanding its stockpile at breakneck speeds. 

Last year, researchers affiliated with the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that China could have as many intercontinental missiles as the U.S. and Russia within six years, having already expanded its arsenal to more than 500 warheads. Additionally, the U.S. lags Russia and China in the testing and deployment of hypersonic missiles. 

Heinrichs says the order also addresses another homeland vulnerability presented by drones. 

“The EO is comprehensive in that it also addresses the need to protect the country from drones," she said. "Our federal regulations are standing in our way and we are long overdue for reforms that enable the military to work with the Department of Homeland Security to deploy cutting edge technologies to shoot down unwelcome drones flying over critical infrastructure."

Heinrichs also said: “Now the task will be navigating a complex Pentagon when it will have other critically important national priorities like quickly growing the Navy and the size of our bomber fleet. But this is the cost of failing to resource the Pentagon adequately and naively thinking that trade with hostile countries could supplant good old fashioned hard power when it comes to the best way to keep the peace."

The U.S. has been interested in missile defense throughout the Cold War, the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union from 1947 to 1991, especially after the Soviet Union demonstrated a capacity to compete with the United States in nuclear technology. 

The work on developing a nationwide missile defense system began with the authorization of President Eisenhower and continued throughout the subsequent administration up until Reagan. Most systems at the time were limited in scope or in technological capacity, but still cornered the Soviet Union. 

This allowed the U.S. to use the threat of a defense system as a bargaining chip in negotiations, leading to the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM) in 1972, in which the U.S. and the Soviet Union agreed to limit their missile defense systems. 

Rather than worsening tensions with the Soviet Union, President Reagan believed that developing a working missile defense system would make nuclear weapons obsolete, though technological advancements of the time prevented his vision from becoming reality. 

"What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?” Reagan asked in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech.