Trump Set to Sign Order on One of His Dumbest Military Ideas
Malcolm Ferguson
Forget about the price of eggs—Trump still wants to build the United States its own “iron dome.”
The president is set to sign an executive order that would begin the production of a “next generation” missile defense shield that would envelop the entire country.
“The order calls for an ‘Iron Dome’ for an America, borrowing the name of the short-range Israeli missile defense system that for years has been used to intercept launches from Gaza. The U.S. provided billions of dollars in funding to Iron Dome, and the US Army has its own system,” White House reporter Alayna Treene
wrote on X.
The Israeli Iron Dome was a collaboration between Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and U.S. weapons manufacturer Raytheon that came online in 2011. It is not a literal iron dome but a system of “interceptor missiles” that can shoot down enemy missiles before they reach their targets
Even still, it’s hard to imagine a system that could do the same for the entirety of the continental U.S., as Trump has suggested multiple times before today.
“We will build a great iron dome over our country, a dome like has never seen before, a state-of-the-art missile defense shield that will be entirely built in America,” Trump
said at a Wisconsin campaign rally last summer. “We are going to build the greatest dome of them all. You see what happened in Israel, they shot 3000 missiles and they knocked down almost all of them … we are entitled to that also, you know and it was our idea, by the way.”
The iron dome was also the eighth point of the first part of his campaign platform, as the president
promised to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY—ALL MADE IN AMERICA.”
National security analyst Joseph Cirincione has been highly skeptical since the beginning of Trump’s iron dome fantasy.
“[The] Iron Dome is designed to intercept short-range rockets, not intercontinental ballistic missiles. Each Iron Dome system can defend an area of roughly 150 square miles,” Cirincione wrote for the Defense One website last summer. “We would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the 3.7 million square miles of the continental United States. At $100 million per battery, that would be approximately $2,470,000,000,000.”
Not only would this iron dome be a waste of time and effort, it would also cost three times more than America’s entire military budget for 2025.
The president wants to implement a costly missile defense system in order to do something about the zero missiles that fall on the United States every year.
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