From Reagan’s Star Wars to Trump’s Iron Dome vision, the quest for an American missile shield faces harsh technical realities and poses unprecedented global risks.
In an age of hypersonic weapons and artificial intelligence, can any nation truly build an impenetrable shield against missile attacks?
As President Donald Trump signs an executive order calling for an “Iron Dome for America,” this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast explores the tantalizing dream of an impenetrable missile defense and its sobering realities.
Marion Messmer, senior research fellow at London’s Chatham House International Security Program, lays bare the real problems behind the rhetorical hype of space-based defense systems. While Israel’s Iron Dome has captured the world’s imagination, Messmer reveals why scaling such technology to protect the entire United States presents unprecedented challenges that go far beyond mere size and cost.
She explores how the missile defense landscape has evolved dramatically since Reagan’s proposed Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) 40 years ago. Today’s threats include maneuverable-en-route hypersonic weapons, sophisticated decoy arrays, and the possibility of attacks from multiple directions.
Messmer also offers thought-provoking insights into how Russia and China view American missile defense ambitions — and why their reactions could trigger dangerous consequences for global security.
The discussion extends to the role artificial intelligence might play in future defense systems, and whether defensive technology can ever truly catch up with offensive capabilities.
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(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)
Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy Podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. From ancient city walls to medieval castles, the dream of an impenetrable shield has captivated military planners and political leaders throughout history. Today, as hypersonic weapons slice through the atmosphere at Mach 5, Artificial Intelligence transforms warfare, and as the boundary between Earth and space becomes a potential battleground, the ancient dream has taken on a new fantasy. 40 years ago, President Reagan captured this timeless aspiration with his strategic defense initiative, star wars, a bold vision that promised to make nuclear weapons obsolete through the power of space-based defense. While that 30 billion-dollar dream remained unrealized, its ambitions helped reshape the global order.
Now, in a world of drone swarms and renewed great power competition, Trump has signed an executive order calling for what he terms an iron dome for America, a next-generation missile shield that once again reaches for the stars. Trump’s executive order calling for a national missile defense shield isn’t just about technology. It’s about a fundamental question that has haunted strategies since the dawn of the nuclear age. Can defense ever truly catch up with offense in the era of unprecedented technological progress?
Joining me to explore this question is Dr. Marion Messmer, senior research fellow with the International Security Program at Chatham House. As nations grapple with the intersection of space power, nuclear deterrence, and emerging technologies, Dr. Messmer’s work has become essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the future of strategic defense. At a moment when the line between science fiction and military reality grows increasingly blurry, her analysis cuts through the hype to examine what’s truly possible and what’s truly at stake. It is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Marion Messmer here to the program. Dr. Messmer, thanks so much for joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.
Dr. Marion Messmer: Thanks so much for having me and thanks for the wonderful introduction.
Jeff: Well, it is a delight to have you here. Thank you so much. When we think about something like star wars or a defense initiative today and we think about it in the context, particularly of what Reagan proposed 40-some years ago, are we allowing our fascination with technology today to really get the better of us? Are we really confusing the reality of something like some defense initiative with our fascination with 21st-century technology?
Marion: I think it’s really understandable why this myth of a defense shield for the United States persists. Because it’s a good narrative to sell to people. Everyone wants to feel more secure. Everyone’s really worried about what’s going on in the world. So that makes a lot of sense to me. But unfortunately, building such a defensive system is incredibly difficult and the evidence suggests that it’s actually fundamentally not possible.
And so that’s my worry in all of this because we always focus on the potential and what we’re hoping to achieve when the reality, unfortunately, suggests that it’s very possible that the United States would just invest a lot more money in researching how to make missile defense a possibility but wouldn’t actually get to something like what was outlined in the executive order, like the Iron Dome that Israel has.
Jeff: And in many ways, that’s captivated people’s attention, the Israeli Iron Dome, and really made it look like something like this might be possible, even though you’re talking about with respect to the US, a country 400 times larger than Israel.
Marion: That’s right. And that’s where a lot of the problem comes from. Israel’s Iron Dome is a huge technical achievement. And there are a lot of people that would have said that even achieving the intercept rates that Israel has achieved wouldn’t be possible. But even with that, the Iron Dome isn’t impenetrable. And the missile defense challenge that Israel faces is very different to the missile defense challenge that the United States would face because Israel is much smaller.
The missiles come from a much more limited range of directions and angles. And the kind of missiles that Israel is trying to defend against also tend to be on the lower end of technical sophistication. So there are lots of reasons why it’s a much easier challenge than the kind of missile defense that we would be talking about if we’re talking about, for example, a nuclear attack on the United States, which is always one of the things that’s on people’s minds when they talk about missile defense for the US.
Jeff: Talk a little bit about how much more complex this defense system for the US would have to be even more than 40 years ago because the nature of the weaponry has changed in 40 years.
Marion: Yes, completely. So first of all, there are several more actors that the US would want to defend from, even if we’re just looking at the states that could potentially fire missiles, whether they’re nuclear armed or not at the US. So when Reagan was talking about his idea of a missile defense for the US, the US was still primarily only concerned with missiles potentially coming from the Soviet Union, so from today’s Russia. Whereas today we’re looking at missiles potentially being fired from Russia, but also from China, but also from North Korea. And both Russia and China also have a lot of mobile systems on submarines and so on, which make it even harder to know exactly where the missiles would be coming from.
So the first challenge is the direction from which the missiles would be fired. The second challenge is the greater diversity of potential missiles that could come in. So we’ve got traditional intercontinental ballistic missiles, but we also have a range of hypersonic glide vehicles, which are also steerable when they’re in flight so they can change direction, which is something that we traditionally didn’t expect from missiles.
And so those are just some of the elements that have introduced a lot more complexity into this challenge. And that means that if we take together the fact that the US is really large and also you have bits of the United States territory that aren’t contiguous, such as Alaska or Hawaii, you have the challenge of having many more actors that could potentially want to attack the US. And you have the issue that they aren’t all using the same system, but they’re using a range of different systems, then that makes it a much more difficult challenge than what Israel is facing.
Jeff: We also have the threat of smaller weapons, things like drones, really miniaturization of even nuclear weapons today that creates a whole different set of problems.
Marion: Well, so the reason why I didn’t so much focus on drones is because drones would need to be launched relatively close to the United States to be a problem. So maybe off a ship that’s off the coast or maybe from bordering territory which would mean that someone who would want to harm the US would need to be in Canada or Mexico. So that makes it a bit less of a threat.
There’s a lot of damage that you could do with drones, but I would be more worried that a drone attack would be either a non-state actor or a terrorist attack or something like that. Whereas normally when we’re talking about missile defense for the US, we’re worried about sort of big strategic-level attacks.
For Israel, again, that’s a little different because of the kinds of threats that Israel is facing. So Israel is also very worried about drones from Iran, for example. But yes, if the US wanted to invest in drone defense, then I would think about much smaller strategic targets, potentially things like the Pentagon or certain military bases, something like that, or maybe even cities, airports. But I wouldn’t necessarily want to try to protect all of the United States from drone attacks.
Jeff: Beyond the cost of any missile defense system, which would be astronomical, and we can talk about that, to what extent is the technology even existent at this point to begin to think about this? The Trump executive order calls for some plan to be in place in 60 days. How realistic is that or how unrealistic is that?
Marion: I think it depends a bit on what missile defense we’re talking about. So the US already has a range of different missile defense systems, which includes different interceptors that could intercept different missile attacks, and it also includes different sensors and radars that can essentially detect incoming attacks. I think the element that’s particularly unrealistic is also bringing us back to Reagan’s vision of having space-based interceptors.
So that’s something that sounds good. That’s something that various different US administrations have come back to at different times because it’s just a very tempting concept but it actually is very difficult to execute and it’s not necessarily going to be very reliable. And the other element that is also potentially concerning about it is that it could really upset the strategic balance with Russia and China, and essentially lead them to invest even more in offensive weaponry or also in space-based weaponry which could then fuel an arms race in space. Which actually wouldn’t really benefit anyone and would just be a huge waste of taxpayer money in the United States.
And so, if it turns out that the direction that the United States goes in is essentially increasing the range of sensors or the range of interceptors that they already have, then I think that would be costly, but that would be feasible. It would necessarily have the stated desired outcome of creating this impenetrable shield over the United States, because I don’t think that that’s achievable.
But if we’re talking all the way to having space-based interceptors and so on, then we’re essentially looking at decades of technical development, several, probably hundreds of billions of dollars of investment, and a very uncertain outcome that probably wouldn’t really deliver what the president is hoping that it would deliver.
Jeff: What do we know about the technical prowess of China in this area and the degree to which they’ve invested anything in exploring this?
Marion: Well, China has primarily been focused recently on increasing its offensive capabilities. And I think this is probably part of why the United States is more worried now and is hoping to also increase its defensive capabilities.
In terms of actual missile defense capabilities, I’m not sure what Chinese systems look like at the moment. But one of the things that we keep coming back to whenever missile defense has come up as a big strategic question is that physicists, no matter whether they were based in the Soviet Union or whether they were based in the United States, essentially had the same challenges with trying to improve missile defense because a lot of the challenges are essentially scientific and technical, and that’s part of why they can’t be overcome.
It’s not one of those things where you can just outspend. It’s one of those things where you’re essentially working with the kind of trajectories that missiles have with numbers of how many interceptors would you need in order to be able to shoot down a certain number of missiles with a high percentage of likelihood. And that’s just a very technical challenge that essentially can’t necessarily be overcome just because you put more money into it.
Jeff: What role, if any, might AI play in all of this?
Marion: So, AI can essentially help us potentially target intercepts more reliably. So, one of the big challenges that missile defense systems tend to have is they need to sense accurately how many missiles are incoming and what their flight path is, and then they essentially need to very quickly target the interceptors on that basis. But because that’s a known operation, there’s then also very likely going to be a range of decoy missiles in there that aren’t real, but are just fired off in order to overwhelm any missile defense systems.
And so, the real advantage that AI could have in this regard is essentially help us process incoming signals more quickly, and then program the interceptors faster to lock in on their targets. To an extent, the existing missile defense systems that the US have already use machine learning algorithms that are a type of AI that essentially try to do the operation. So, having a better or faster or more reliable version of those algorithms would essentially increase what they can do.
But even then, I just want to make clear to your listeners that there essentially isn’t any way to guarantee that you can’t fire so many missiles to overwhelm the missile defense system. That’s the fundamental flaw that all missile defense systems have. That if you’re able to fire off a large enough number of missiles or a large enough mix of missiles and decoys any system can be overwhelmed and you can essentially guarantee that some of your missiles are going to get through to your target in that way.
Jeff: Since Reagan’s initiative 40-some years ago, has research continued in this area, and if so, where? Is this research the government’s been doing, military contractors have been doing? Where is work happening in this area?
Marion: This research has continued in a range of ways. So, one of the things I want to make sure your readers– your listeners understand is that missile defense isn’t all the same. So, we’ve got some missile defense that works relatively reliably such as in the case of Israel. And that usually tends to be for smaller or very specific target. So, whether you’re trying to secure maybe a city or maybe a certain site or maybe you’ve got mobile missile defense to make sure that, let’s say you’re deploying troops in a battlefield situation, you might have mobile missile defense to try and protect them as much as possible.
So essentially the more specific your task, the more reliable your missile defense. And so, that’s essentially an ongoing area of research where various defense contractors and government and academic researchers have continued to improve these systems. And then the US government has also invested in their national labs and through their defense contractor relationships over the years, trying to figure out what we can do about various ones of these problems. And also, essentially whenever you have an advance in offensive weaponry, then there’s also an attempt to try and figure out what you could do on the defensive side.
So, when various advances were made when it came to hypersonic light vehicles and similar maneuverable new technologies, then around that time there was also additional investments made to figure out what we could do to defend against those. I think defense is always lagging behind a little bit, but just because we understood that it’s very difficult to do missile defense doesn’t mean that we completely stopped researching into that or looking into that.
There have been various attempts at figuring out better technical solutions. And in the cases of the various systems that already exist and that are in place in the United States and elsewhere, the technical development of those systems has, of course, also continued to improve over time. Whether that’s in terms of the kind of sensors that you use in order to identify where threats might be coming from or whether that’s indeed in developing better algorithms to analyze the data. All of those are small bits of research and small bits of improvement that have taken place over the last few decades.
Jeff: Can these systems be developed at this point, not unlike the Israeli systems that are city-based? In other words, could an iron dome be put over Washington or New York or London for that matter?
Marion: That would be a lot more feasible. That would be a much easier problem to solve. I would still hesitate to suggest that a system like that could be 100% impenetrable because as we discussed earlier with the Iron Dome, even such a sophisticated system can still be overwhelmed if the attack that’s fired in its direction is high frequency enough or complex enough. But the smaller your target and the more precise the problem that you’re trying to solve. So, let’s say for example, missile defense for Washington DC that’s much more feasible than if you’re looking at missile defense for all of the United States.
Jeff: How does Europe look at this idea?
Marion: It’s also a big challenge for Europe. It’s something that the Russian invasion of Ukraine has really brought to the fore again. Because we’ve also unfortunately seen in Ukraine what kind of damage can be done with various missiles. And so, the German government announced an initiative that it called the European Sky Shield, which brings together a few different NATO member states that essentially want to invest further in their missile defense. And essentially various governments around Europe are looking at what more they can do.
NATO has a few different missile defense sites that were originally planned and implemented when there was a lot of concern about potential missile threats from Iran. And so, there’s some missile defense in place in Europe, but a lot of Europeans are worried that given the size of the threat that we’ve seen play out in Ukraine, that actually there’s much more that European states could do when it comes to missile defense as well.
Jeff: With this hanging in the balance, and certainly, the idea of it has been around, as we’ve talked about for quite a while, are offensive weapons today being designed, being built with this in mind, with the idea of defense systems of the future in mind?
Marion: I would assume so. We saw a lot of those discussions play out when the first hypersonic glide vehicles were introduced just as concepts. There was this real concern that as delivery systems are becoming more maneuverable are becoming stealthier, missile defense is getting harder. And throughout the history of weapons development, we essentially have this push and pull between offensive and defensive systems where almost every time you have some sort of an innovation in the defense side, you then also have some sort of an innovation in the offense side.
Especially when we’re talking about nuclear weapons, every nuclear state is really worried about no longer having their second strike capabilities which is essentially the backbone of nuclear deterrent. And so for a state like Russia, it’s essentially crucial to ensure that their second strike capabilities vis-a-vis the United States are still in place. Because if they aren’t, then they would be really worried that their nuclear deterrence with the United States would break down. So one of my concerns with this missile defense plan is essentially that the president underestimates the extent to which Russia or China might be worried about a weakening deterrent relationship with the United States.
Jeff: Talk about it with respect to Russia, we understand the technological abilities or arguably the technological abilities of China. Where does Russia stand in all this in terms of its technological abilities to respond to something like this?
Marion: Yes, Russia has signaled for years that they are really concerned about any missile defense capability. This is actually something that goes back not just to the Reagan years, but also prior to the Reagan years. So in the early ’70s, the Soviet Union and the US signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty which essentially limited the amount of missile defense that the two states could develop because there was this worry that if they invested further in missile defense, it could potentially weaken the nuclear deterrent relationship between the two states.
The US eventually left the ABM treaty because they were worried about other missile threats and felt that they needed to develop more missile defense thinking about threats such as Iran or North Korea. But the Russian government today remains incredibly worried about ending up in a unbalanced situation with the United States.
And if we’re looking at something like that, especially in a tense international security environments such as today, then worrying about nuclear imbalance could actually lead to a nuclear first strike which is, of course, something that no one wants. But that tends to be how nuclear strategy decision-making goes. If you’re worried about losing your nuclear weapons, then you might consider striking first in order to regain that advantage.
Jeff: How staggering are we talking about the costs for something like this? They were huge back in Reagan’s day, and of course that was 40 years ago. Those numbers can only be significantly larger today.
Marion: Yes, you could invest any amount in this. Especially if we’re talking about these space-based systems, you are looking at potentially tens or hundreds of billions of dollars because you’re looking at the cost of a space-based program which not just includes the significant development costs, but also eventually the costs of launching something into space and then maintaining a system that’s in space. So the sky is the limit really, or maybe space is the limit in this regard.
And that’s one of the things that worries me because we know that the US is facing a tough economic situation. There are trade-offs between different kinds of government programs and investing such a huge amount of money into a program that is not really guaranteed a success would then mean that the US doesn’t have the funds available to invest in something else that could potentially have a much higher rate of success.
So I think we should really take Reagan’s Star Wars program as a warning here and say that it’s essentially been done already.
And maybe we want to invest in better early warning systems or maybe we want to expand the kind of interceptors that the US already has currently. But I personally wouldn’t advise investing further in something space-based because that has a very low technical chance of success and it also potentially has a lot of strategic implications that the US might actually not want to deal with.
Jeff: Talk about the larger frame of the militarization of space itself.
Marion: Yes, that’s, of course, one of the big challenges here. We’ve seen more and more states become very interested in space and as there are more and more commercial partners available that would allow even smaller states to be present in space, there’s essentially just more happening there that has its own risks. All the existing regulations that we’ve got that try to make sure that space remains accessible to all and remains as a common good are several decades old at this point and haven’t necessarily kept up with technological advances.
And at some point recently, either last year or the year before, there were some talks about Russia is potentially investing in space-based weapons. So if this turns into a new arms race where the US, Russia, and China are all trying to send more weapons into space, then that’s not only really costly, that’s also potentially another domain where escalation might happen.
And it also carries the real risk of some sort of a space-based accident which could then have a knock-on effect damaging all the barriers. Civilian satellites are up there that we need for things like GPS, or telecommunications, or weather services, all sorts of space-based monitoring is reliant on these systems, and it wouldn’t be easy to replace them if they were damaged.
So I think when it comes to space, restrained should really be at the forefront of all state minds that are currently active in space because so many states around the globe rely on these systems and many of them actually haven’t got the space-faring abilities to put their own systems in place. Yes, so I’d be really worried about a new arms race that focuses on space-based systems that completely runs away from us and potentially could lead to an escalation or damage existing space-based infrastructure.
Jeff: And within this frame, how should we look at the extent which is growing, it seems every day of the privatization of space and the ability for things to be put there that the governments have nothing to do with essentially?
Marion: I think on the one hand it’s really good to have this commercial competition because it drives technological innovation, it might make systems more affordable and it also in a way democratizes who has access to space. It means that a much smaller state could potentially buy a Starlink contract on Amazon contract, and through that get access to space-based systems that it previously wouldn’t be able to have access to.
So all of that is good, but on the flip side, it also means that when it comes to, for example, the cleanup of space or making sure that we reduce the amount of debris that’s in space, there isn’t necessarily the responsibility or the enforceability of those norms there.
And so unless you have a private sector that’s very motivated to make sure that it takes responsibility for space as a common good rather than just trying to keep costs slow and focus on how to make the most profit, then I think we could be in a situation where space gets increasingly congested because there’s more and more active systems up there, but also because we now are looking at several decades of debris of essentially broken satellites or bits of space debris that are up there from some space mission. And that’s only going to increase the more various commercial and government entities we have accessing space.
Jeff: And how much more dangerous does that make things from a military perspective?
Marion: It would make it pretty dangerous, not just from a military perspective actually, but for all of us. There is this potential risk called Kessler syndrome which is where one bit of space debris essentially ricochets of a satellite or some other bit of space infrastructure and damages it and knocks it into something else. And so because you have this chain reaction where systems begin knocking into each other and damaging each other, you all of a sudden might be in an environment where most satellites have been taken out or damaged or what have you. And so this is something that only becomes more likely the more stuff you have up there.
Jeff: And are we seeing the cutting-edge of offensive weapons being developed that really create a whole new generation of offensive weapons or will ultimately create such a generation of weapons that really can bypass any design or any concept of a missile shield that existed today?
Marion: I think we’ve long had offensive weapons that can bypass missile shields. Even with the most basic missile, if you fire enough of them, you can overwhelm a missile shield and you can essentially make sure that 20%, 30%, maybe even 50% of your missiles get through. So, it has always just depended on how many missiles you could generate and what other decoy things you could fire towards a missile shield. But I think if we’re thinking about things like hypersonic glide vehicles and other maneuverable delivery systems, then that also adds another layer of complexity just because a lot of the assumption behind ballistic missile defense relies on a fixed flight trajectory. And so if the flight trajectory changes mid-course, then of course your interceptor could be targeted in one direction and then essentially miss just because the delivery vehicle actually moves. So that just adds to the complexity.
Jeff: And people that do the kind of research and look at these issues the way you do, what worries them the most about all of this?
Marion: Actually what worries me the most is not necessarily the technical challenges that we’re looking at because we’ve had them for a long time. What worries me is that we seem to be in a period of international affairs where there is– It seems like every day the tensions between states get worse for various reasons. And heads of states are less and less willing to talk to each other.
And so if you have such a low level of trust, and if you have such a high level of tensions, then it essentially means that if there is a false alarm or if there is some sort of an accident, then that is much more likely to be interpreted as an offensive signal rather than just something that could easily be discussed or sorted out. So I’m really worried about the potential for unintended escalation or unintended consequences just because of the high levels of tensions that we’ve got at the moment.
Jeff: Dr. Marion Messmer, I thank you so very much for spending time with us.
Marion: Thank you. Great to be here.
Jeff: Thank you. And thank you for listening and joining us here on The WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.
