An “American Iron Dome”: Perhaps the Most Ridiculous Trump Idea Yet

In fact, the Republican Party platform released by Donald Trump in July contains few concrete policy proposals.

But one of the few concrete ideas is a call to (apologies for the use of capital letters) “prevent the outbreak of World War III” by building “a great Iron Dome missile shield across our entire country”—a plan that experts say is nearly impossible to implement, unnecessary, and even hard to understand.

Trump has pledged to build this Iron Dome in several speeches. It is among the 20 core promises of his campaign. The former president has said that the missile shield would be “made in America” and would create jobs while stopping foreign attacks.

While it may sound nice to talk about building the “biggest dome ever,” as Trump recently claimed, Jeffrey Lewis, a missile expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at Middlebury, says such a project is ridiculous.

“I don’t really understand what any of this means,” Lewis said of the Iron Dome idea, “other than to treat it as the crazy ramblings of a senile old person.”

It might be more useful to think of America’s Iron Dome as an exercise in bombastic businessmanship rather than a viable policy position, Lewis said: “Here, Iron Dome has become just a kind of brand, like a Xerox or Kleenex for missile defense.” “.

Iron Dome, a short-range missile defense system created by Israeli state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and U.S. arms manufacturer Raytheon, has been a valuable part of the country’s military arsenal since it became operational in 2011. It is not, as its name suggests, an impenetrable shield. It is more mobile: When a short-range missile reaches Israeli airspace, “interceptor missiles” are launched to detonate it before it hits the ground.

Iron Dome’s function depends on Israel’s relatively small size and proximity to its enemies. That makes it particularly difficult to imagine a similar system in the United States, which is more than 400 times larger in geographic area than Israel. National security analyst Joseph Cirincione has estimated that such a system would cost about $2.5 trillion. That’s more than three times the country’s projected military budget for 2025.

Such a system would also not be necessary. So far, no armed group is sending missiles toward the United States from Iron Dome’s theoretical 40-mile interceptor range. “Such a system couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles launched from the Bahamas, about 80 miles away,” Cirincione wrote in late July.

The U.S. missile defense network in place since the Bush administration currently includes 44 interceptor missiles stationed in California and Alaska, aimed at longer-range missiles, such as those that could be launched from North Korea. But the system has performed poorly in tests, even though Republicans generally claim it “works,” Lewis said. (Groups like the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been calling for increased funding for missile defense since at least the 1990s.)

“That’s why it’s so hard to understand what Trump is saying,” Lewis continued. “Is Trump saying the system in Alaska doesn’t work? Is Trump saying Canada is going to develop artillery missiles to use against North Dakota?”