The Pentagon is working to make Trump’s vision of a U.S. 'Iron Dome' a reality

Pentagon officials will soon brief Trump on options for him to fulfill his pledge to protect the U.S. with something modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome defense

Defense Department officials will soon brief President Donald Trump on a variety of options for him to fulfill his pledge to protect the United States with something modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome anti-missile defense, according to U.S. officials and experts familiar with the initiative.

Like former President Ronald Reagan’s push for the Strategic Defense Initiative, which was proposed to protect the U.S. from Soviet nuclear missiles, Trump’s call for an “Iron Dome for America,” more often referred to as Golden Dome, is a signature endeavor that could sew together multiple air defense systems with the idea of keeping the country and perhaps eventually American assets around the world safe.

The Strategic Defense Initiative, which has come to be known by its mocking nickname, “Star Wars,” was never operational, and it was all but canceled years after Reagan left office. Trump’s plan is seen as more realistic than SDI was, given technological advances since the 1980s, but the biggest vision the administration is contemplating — including stopping nuclear missiles fired from another continent — would most likely be extremely expensive and take years.

The Patriot missile defense system is fired during NATO drills in Chania, Greece, in 2017.Sebastian Apel / AP fileThe intercontinental ballistic nuclear missiles Reagan wanted to protect against can now be stopped to some extent, at least in theory. Israel’s Iron Dome has largely been seen as successful in its job warding off small rocket and artillery attacks. It has a clearer and easier task than any U.S. system would, however — a country less than 1% as large as the United States to protect from enemies next to it, rather than oceans away. Trump’s Golden Dome would most likely be a patchwork of systems that would need to stop a wide variety of threats, including cruise missiles fired from ships off the coast, ballistic missiles launched from countries such as Russia or China, attacks from drones inside the continental U.S. and state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles that can travel hundreds of miles in a single minute.

Some elements of Golden Dome would involve simply repurposing existing parts of the U.S. arsenal, such as surface-to-air defenses, destroyers and fighter jets. Smaller-scale moves like those could be completed in months or even weeks in some cases, officials said. But depending on the option Trump chooses, the U.S. might find itself spending hundreds of billions of dollars to develop new technologies that would become part of the defense system years down the road.