Terry Gerton You’ve got a new paper out looking at the Golden Dome. It’s certainly been a big topic of conversation, a big feature in Congress’ discussion about the military budget. A lot of folks look at that and say, there’s so much new technology. You look at it and see something different. Talk to me a little bit about what you see that maybe the advocates of Golden Domes don’t.
Michael O’Hanlon Well, I agree with the advocates on some specific technological points and certainly acknowledgement of the remarkable progress. And we see the progress before our own eyes in the way that Patriot interceptors in particular, but also THAAD and standard missile interceptors are, when they’re available, shooting down a lot of the ballistic missiles being fired by Russia at Ukraine or by Iran at the Gulf Cooperation Council countries, plus Jordan and Israel. And so there’s no doubt that there’s been a huge amount of headway. I’ve been studying this issue my whole career. My master’s thesis in the mid 1980s was on missile defense. And if you go back, really missile defense concepts are almost as old as ballistic missiles themselves, certainly dating back to the 1960s. But we always felt that the technology on defense wasn’t quite good enough to really be worth the trouble, especially if you’re really trying to intercept nuclear armed interceptors where you’ve got to be very close to 100 percent to have a meaningful reduction in the catastrophe that could result from impact or detonation. But a lot of ballistic missiles around the world are armed with conventional warheads and aimed at military targets, and they’re playing the probability and statistics game is a worthy venture. You often can partially protect your key assets. So I support the whole idea. My paper was written actually as an advocacy piece for an expanded missile and air defense architecture for the United States. So on that fundamental point, I agree with President Trump and with Secretary Hegseth and with the Office of Golden Dome for America. It’s just that I don’t necessarily agree with the architectures they may have in mind or the full panoply of technologies. And I think the one I would hone in on as most questionable for a number of reasons is space-based interceptors, the idea of putting low-altitude satellites that basically house interceptor missiles. You know, in a couple hundred miles above Earth, ready to be launched at a given moment continuously and have them up there for years on end. And we can get into the reasons why I’m skeptical in a second. But most other technologies, I think, do show really some substantial promise to the point of being worth deployment at some level. But one last point to conclude this opening thought on, we have to be aware of the possibility still today of offense-defense arms races, where you wind up putting up defenses that the other side thinks are gonna be more effective than they really might be. So they overcompensate by building up their offensive forces to make sure they can saturate and penetrate your defense. But it turns out your defense perhaps is not quite as good as you thought, especially against an odd attack that really tries to confuse and overwhelm. And so you wind with the net effect that you’re not any safer because the other has increased its offensive capacity by more than you’re able to actually shoot down. So, we have to keep that possible dynamic in mind as we think about architectures.
Terry Gerton Your paper spends a lot of time on what, to the lay reader, might be very technical provisions and processes here. But ultimately, you come down to the laws of physics, saying that there are just some things that even the best technologies can’t overcome. How do you think folks who are designing the system, or at least behind the system now, maybe are missing those realities?
Michael O’Hanlon Well, I talk to some of those people and they’re brilliant. And so I’m not gonna say they’re missing anything. What I am gonna say is they’re doing their specific job. Their job is to make the best technology they can for whatever layer of defense they’re trying to provide. And then it’s the job of the rest of us in the Congress and in the Pentagon, the strategist community, to think about the integrated system and whether it’s really worth the money and worth the trouble, whether it will be a net contributor to American national security. So I don’t have any qualms about the quality of technology innovation. But let me just maybe quickly review the different things that are out there. So right now we do have a National Missile Defense deployed. It’s mostly long range interceptors in Alaska. And we have 40 there and four more in California. And they’re positioned on the West Coast because the most likely attacker is thought to be North Korea. And that goes back to the early years of the 21st century under President Bush in particular. When North Korea was breaking out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, developing long-range missiles or ICBMs, and developing nuclear bombs and testing them. And we thought that North Korea, was the kind of country that maybe we could build a strong enough defense to take on its offensive forces, because it doesn’t have a lot of money, doesn’t a lot technology, can’t really be 100% sure its nuclear warheads would detonate after they’ve gone through this very violent descent through the atmosphere, like, we’ve all seen the tragedy of space shuttles destroyed on descent and other things. This is not easy to do, and the North Koreans can’t really completely realistically test their systems because they’re shooting out into the open ocean. And so that was the idea behind that system. So it’s ground-based in silos and big rockets. And then at the top of that, several-stage, usually three-stage rocket, I believe, would be a so-called kill vehicle, which detaches from the rest of the rocket for the final approach to target and collides with it in such a way that no explosive is needed. The sheer force of collision is enough when the two things are both going in opposite directions at several miles a second to just annihilate. And the guidance has gotten so good that against a so-called ballistic target, one that’s just moving along a freefall trajectory, we can actually steer the interceptor into a position where it probably will collide with that incoming warhead. Now, I shouldn’t oversell because that system has only been successfully tested on about half of its overall attempts, about nine or 10 out of 18. They’re trying to build a better interceptor that would have even more precision and reliability, but that’s still a work in progress. That’s the kind of system we can do today. Plus, we can the shorter range defenses against shorter range missiles. That’s where Patriot and THAAD and Standard Missile come into play, as well as the Israeli Iron Dome that helped inspire President Trump’s Golden Dome. And that includes things like Israel’s Arrow Interceptor. So in summary, the shorter range land-based systems are quite promising against ballistic missiles in particular, the ones that fire for a while and then just go into free fall. The longer range intercept capabilities are not quite as strong, but progressing. But it’s a whole different kettle of fish to think about putting interceptors in space. You’ve got to get them up there and keep them up there for years on end. You can’t really easily maintain them while they’re there. And they constantly move if they’re in low Earth orbit, you know, just a couple of hundred miles above the Earth because that’s just the physics of it. That’s the reality. Any object in orbit, a couple hundred, up to a couple thousand miles above Earth is always going to be in motion relative to the Earth’s surface. And that creates something called the absentee ratio, which really just means most interceptors will statistically be out of position at any given moment relative to where a threat might be launched And so if you’re going to intercept that outgoing rocket, especially while it’s still burning the first three to five minutes after launch, you’ve got to, by happenstance, almost happened to have been within a couple hundred miles right above it In order to have a decent chance. And that means you’ve actually a defender needs to put up into space, believe it or not, hundreds of interceptors over all of Earth just to make sure one is in the right place And then if you have to shoot down 10 or 20 or 50 or even 100 missiles, multiply that absentee ratio by 10 or 20 or 50, or a hundred. So all of a sudden, according to the Congressional Budget Office and its report this spring on the Golden Dome idea, you might need to have several thousand interceptors in orbit at a time just to be able to shoot out, let’s say, ten enemy ICBMs, or long-range missiles, in their boost phase. It’s particularly difficult in that boost phase because it’s so short. Doesn’t give you much time to react. And so if it’s $20 million an interceptor, and you got to put up 7,000 of them, and then you’ve got to replenish them every five or so years because of a little bit of drag that still operates at that altitude, that gradually weakens these interceptor orbits and brings them down. And by the way, you got bring them down in a safe way as well. All of a sudden, now you’re talking about a $700 billion price tag over 20 years for that space based piece, just to be able to shoot down 10 missiles. And so I just don’t see the value proposition there, even if you can make the technology work. And so far that that technology is unproven. The idea that you could put it in space and launch it when you need to. So that’s the part that I take the strongest exception to. It doesn’t mean, you know, maybe you could try an experimental capability just so you’ve got a few up there and see how they work and get, you now, practice operating them and developing them. Or maybe you can try for the boost, not the boost phase, but the mid-course phase of flight. Which lasts about 20 minutes where the warheads that are headed for the United States would be outside the atmosphere, following this free fall or ballistic trajectory. And there you would have more time. So the absentee ratio wouldn’t be as bad. Maybe you only need a couple dozen interceptors for every one that’s in the right place. And so maybe you need a few hundred or a couple thousand up in space overall. But the problem there… Is again from the laws of physics that the warheads might not be so easily recognizable if they’re in a broader threat cloud that includes decoys, that includes very light objects that have been released outside the atmosphere after the burn phase or the boost phase of flight for the ICBM and which travel at that same speed virtually identical to the warhead in the free fall and the vacuum of outer space. And so it’s extremely hard, especially with hit to kill technology, to figure out which object is the warhead and which ones are the decoys. So in mid course flight, the absentee ratio is not as severe, but the decoy threat or problem is much worse, the discrimination problem. So one way or the other, the laws of physics are really complicating your task if you’re in outer space.
Terry Gerton Michael O’Hanlon is Senior Fellow and Director of Research in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. We’ve all seen really ambitious government programs before, maybe in defense, maybe in NASA, where we never really get to the objective of the program. But along the way, we make a lot of very interesting discoveries and deployments. Do you think that’s what’s happening here? The ambition maybe is bigger than the potential science, but along the we’re going to learn a lot?
Michael O’Hanlon Yeah, I mean, some of that will happen. And by the way, Ronald Reagan’s strategic defense initiative launched in 1983 and popularly known as Star Wars did contribute to the end of the Cold War, I think, because it convinced the Soviets that they were now facing the United States that had technologies they couldn’t even touch. They couldn’t, I mean, they could probably overwhelm them with their offensive force, but they were competing with us in a realm of high technology that they just did not belong in the same league. And so you could have indirect effects at the technological level, as you just mentioned. You could have benefits at the strategic level, but you could also have downsides at the strategic level if other countries overcompensate, like I was saying earlier, and build up their offensive forces even bigger, and then put their weapons on an even more sort of rapid reaction, hair trigger alert, because they’re concerned they cannot afford to be struck first, since our defenses might be able to mop up whatever’s left. So you might make the strategic balance less stable if you’re not careful. This has to be pursued, I think, at the same time you’re talking to Russia and China, not because we owe them a veto, but because we do have to mitigate their worst case worries for our own safety as well as theirs. And so, yeah, some of the technology is certainly worth exploring. Some of it is worth deploying, but you gotta be careful and think it through at each step and also not bust the bank and bust the Pentagon budget by putting many tens of billions of dollars a year into this at the expense, potentially, of other areas of military innovation and capability that might be just as important for deterring Russia and deterring China.
Terry Gerton Well, the strategy and budget question brings us back to Congress. Members of Congress seem to have a lot of questions about the Golden Dome and not a lot of comfort with whatever answers they’ve received so far. Given the funding that has already been approved and the work that’s already underway, what should the next steps here be?
Michael O’Hanlon Well congress has to play the role of congress which means let’s look at the architecture, let’s work at the technologies, let’s, you know, if necessary have some of the sessions and classified for us so that you know that there are secret things being developed that we don’t want to have the world know about congress at least needs to know. Congress under article I of the constitution is the only part of our government responsible for raising and equipping and sustaining armies and navies. And that Congressional prerogative or power comes even before the president’s powers as Conferred in article II of the Constitution. Moreover, historically congress has been crucial in any big decision we’ve ever made about buying new weapons or restructuring the military, restructuring the armed forces and it’s really time and I think maybe we’re past this period where congress felt so intimidated by President Trump that they didn’t really even want to play their normal oversight role. In my experience, even if a Congress is led by the same party as the president, people didn’t join Congress just to be shrinking violets or to defer and rubber stamp what their president was requesting. They wanted to run for Congress, recognizing that it is an independent and separate part of government that is crucial for good decision making on matters of war and peace and defense budgeting and everything else. So it’s time for Congress to have hearings, share as much of the information as possible with the broader public, scrutinize these architectures and weigh in as to which ones they really think are appropriate. The executive is still going to have a lot of influence. Pentagon always has a lot it influence over any decisions we make on military modernization and acquisition but Congress needs to be a full partner and right now it hasn’t been on this issue or many others in the last couple years
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