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Sen. Deb Fischer and Sen. Tim Sheehy said President Trump’s efforts to improve the U.S. missile defense systems are crucial to securing domestic security.
Ms. Fischer, Nebraska Republican, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Strategic Forces, threw her support behind Mr. Trump’s proposed Golden Dome system at Threat Status’s Golden Dome for America event Tuesday.
“For the last 40 years, we have found ourselves in a cycle where every 20 years or so, we prioritize homeland missile defense, make progress and then slide back into a new status quo,” she said. “Under the current Trump administration, we have the opportunity to make a generational leap forward in missile defense through the Golden Dome program.”
The system, first proposed by Mr. Trump in a January executive order, directs the Department of Defense to develop a comprehensive missile defense shield for the U.S. The system’s name directly references Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system.
Ms. Fischer pointed to the successes of Iron Dome in defending Israel against missiles from Hamas and Iran.
“Iron Dome intercepted an estimated 85% of these rockets. Later, in May of 2021, of the 1,500 Hamas missiles headed toward populated areas in Israel, Iron Dome intercepted more than 1,400 missiles. That was over 95%,” she said. “While America’s Golden Dome will look different than Israel’s Iron Dome in terms of specific radars and sensors and interceptors, the Iron Dome’s record clearly demonstrates that missile defense works.”
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Mr. Sheehy, Montana Republican and Senate Armed Services Committee member, agreed that Iron Dome cannot be copied and pasted onto the U.S., noting the major differences between America and Israel.
“The challenges don’t scale linearly with the size of Israel, which is the size of New Jersey, by the way. When you are talking space-based interlace defense systems and air defense, that’s an almost exponential logarithmic relationship for size,” he said. “It’s equivalent to taking the engineering challenges of moving a smart car across the parking lot to moving the heaviest-known weight object in man in the history of mankind.”
Mr. Sheehy also announced the launch of a Golden Dome caucus, aimed at revitalizing the development of next-generation missile defense systems. The senator critiqued the current defense acquisition process and called for a new order.
“I think a project of this scope, like we saw in the Apollo program and the Manhattan project, is gonna require a far more close relationship between the appropriators, the DOD, our legislators and industry to ensure that this project does isn’t just built, but it evolves with the threat in real time,” Mr. Sheehy said.
A possible next-generation missile defense shield has gathered significant attention among defense experts since Mr. Trump announced the Golden Dome initiative earlier this year. Defense leaders say that emerging threats from China, Russia, North Korea and Iran necessitate improvements to U.S. missile defense infrastructure.
Specifically, experts point to the proliferation of advanced hypersonic missiles as a direct threat to U.S. security. Most of the U.S.’s missile defense systems are ground-based and designed to defend against traditional ballistic missiles. Hypersonic weapons are significantly faster than ballistic missiles and can avoid interceptors from ground-based defense systems.
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