A veteran of Reagan’s “Star Wars” has doubts about Trump’s “Iron Dome”
Among President Donald Trump’s many executive orders is one calling for a “next-generation missile defense shield.” The White House calls this the Iron Dome for America.
The order says it should defend against all sorts of missile attacks and include “space-based interceptors” that could potentially act as both sensors and weapons.
It reminded retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert Latiff of a Ronald Reagan-era program he worked on: the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, known popularly, and especially to its critics, as “Star Wars.”
Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Latiff about whether the U.S. has the technology, money and time to make this grand project work. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Robert Latiff: Yes and no. Yes, we do have sensor technologies. We have the launch technologies. Whether or not we have the technologies to lash it all together and make it work, I think, is an open question.
Stephanie Hughes: And President Trump has compared this to the defense shield used in Israel. Israel is about the size of New Jersey. The United States is about the size of the United States — many New Jerseys. You know, we’re talking about something way bigger and different kinds of protections too, right?
Latiff: Yeah. So I think the use of the term “Iron Dome” for this one was, was really misleading because the Iron Dome in Israel, it can protect an area of about 150 square miles against targets that maybe are 35 or 40 miles away, short-range ballistic missiles that aren’t going very fast and don’t have any countermeasures necessarily. There’s even some controversy over how good it is. Israel swears by it, others say maybe it’s not as good as they claim.
Hughes: So the secretary of defense has been instructed to come up with a plan that includes a budget. How much would something like this cost?
Latiff: I look at what was proposed in the EO, and I have actually, sort of myself, referred to it as “Star Wars 2.0.” This is very, very much like the old Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative. The estimates for SDI were all over the map, but even some conservative organizations admitted that it was probably going to be more expensive than SDI thought. I would say, probably in the area of $750 billion to a trillion. And I’ve based that on looking at previous estimates for some of the pieces of SDI.
Hughes: And how much time would it take to develop something like this — develop and then, I guess, deploy?
Latiff: Advocates claim, you know, five, six, seven years. I think it’s probably longer than that, just given the history of acquisition projects. But I think 10 years would probably be a reasonable number to posit.
Hughes: What do you mean when you say “acquisition”?
Latiff: Well, our history in acquiring weapon systems of any kind — airplanes, ships, you name it — they always come with some very rosy projections and almost always fail in those projections — almost always over budget, over schedule, over budget is pretty common. I can understand that because people who want to start the program come up with best-case scenarios, and best-case scenarios just never happen. And in this case, I think we would probably have the same thing.
Hughes: You were in the Air Force in 1983, when then-President Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative.
Latiff: I worked on it.
Hughes: Tell me about it. What was that like?
Latiff: It was exciting for someone — I was 33 at the time, we had more money than we knew what to do with, really. So, yeah, it was an exciting time.
Hughes: It sort of fizzled. How did that experience affect how you look at something like this when it’s proposed?
Latiff: Well, you have to ask yourself, why did it fizzle? And I think it fizzled because the enemy went away. 1989-1990, the Berlin Wall was falling, [the] USSR was disappearing, and so the whole rationale for SDI really kind of disappeared. And I think that was also complicated by the fact that they were just beginning to realize that it was going to cost a lot more and take a lot longer. Both of those things came into play.
Hughes: Even if SDI didn’t come to fruition as imagined, how did it affect the way the U.S. approaches defense?
Latiff: Well, [the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization] didn’t continue. Missile defense and [the] Missile Defense Agency still exist today. I don’t know the exact numbers, but we’ve been spending $10 to $15 billion a year on missile defenses.
Hughes: To bring it back to this initiative now, how likely do you think it is that this Iron Dome project, as they’re calling it, comes to fruition?
Latiff: I would only be guessing. I don’t think that in four years’ time, the length of time of President Trump’s administration, that they will be able to get very far with it. If the next president supports it and supports continued large investment of money, I think we could achieve maybe some of it. I hesitate to think that we will ever achieve what the desired end goal is, of a shield above the United States. Probably just couldn’t happen.
Hughes: Yeah. Even if it doesn’t come to fruition as written, how would it affect future defense technology, even just working on it, like you worked on SDI?
Latiff: If they succeed in launching some, maybe perhaps not all, of the satellites, it will provide us with an enormous amount of data, even if they don’t succeed in launching the interceptors. I mean, I think that could end up being a political hot potato, but maybe there’s the will in the government to do that. But even if they don’t launch the interceptor portion of it, I think it will be much to our advantage in tracking future threats and being able to negate future threats in other ways. So even if it didn’t succeed totally, I think what it would leave behind would be valuable.
A note on the potential price tag — Maj. Gen. Latiff’s educated guess was that this proposed defense shield could cost up to $1 trillion. For fiscal year 2024, the budget for the whole Department of Defense came in at about $841 billion. So, this one system could cost what we spend on the entire military in one year.
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