The Continental United States is No Longer a Sanctuary
We must defend our infrastructure to generate and deploy military power abroad
The vision of an air defense bubble over American cities is unlikely to be affordable barring a revolutionary development. But America must start on this path:
President Donald Trump’s executive order to develop a next-generation homeland missile defense shield marks a shift in the United States’ long-standing homeland missile defense strategy, which has focused on threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran rather than from peer adversaries like China or Russia.
The order — titled “The Iron Dome For America” in a nod to the successful, lowest tier of Israel’s multilayered air defense system of the same name — also addresses a broader array of complex threats from hypersonic weapons to cruise missiles.
Further, the order revives the pursuit of space-based interceptors for missile defense, a concept that has been scrapped multiple times in recent history due to technological challenges and high costs associated with the development.
I’ve addressed the fact that the Continental United States (CONUS) is no longer a sanctuary from enemy attack:
America hasn't faced a direct conventional threat to the continental United States in a long time. We've had the luxury of fighting "over there" rather than "over here". Technology is changing that. …
Focused defense is in order. America hasn't worried about protecting our assets to project power abroad since the Army had coastal defense artillery to protect our ports.
That ability to project power without worrying about threats to the homeland has been the key to our global power and influence. But we need not only the free power to project abroad, but the ability to project that power.
Yet cruise missiles with precision targeting could prevent America from projecting our reserve power abroad to support allies. I've worried about our fleet at home. With good reason. Now we have to guard our infrastructure.
Indeed, I’ve specifically mentioned Chinese hypersonic fractional orbit weapons:
Right now the worry over China's partially orbiting nuclear-capable hypersonic weapons has focused on a potential counter-force nuclear first strike against our land-based missiles.
I'm skeptical that China would risk such a strike on the assumption that America could not or would not retaliate with nukes against Chinese cities.
What if China wants hypersonic orbital weapons for a more practical warfighting mission? What if China needs a small number to hit our major ships in port where they are stationary, visible, and most vulnerable? Wouldn't that prevent America from mobilizing and sending reinforcements to defeat China in the western Pacific?
Homeland air defense surely requires including Space Force with actual weapons rather than focusing only on non-kinetic weapons and sensors (tip to Instapundit).
When even a ship accident can cause so much disruption to an American port, you can see the potential for what an enemy can do with the intent to disrupt.
Having a secure America—including from outside attack—is a foundation of American power projection that prevents America from huddling in the New World as enemies build up their power in the Old World:
[China and Russia are potential threats against the eastern and western edges of Eurasia.] So we try to keep Russia as far east as possible where it can't harness the resources of Europe. And we try to keep China penned inside the first island chain by supporting allies there, preventing China from organizing the resources of the western Pacific.
While the China threat is more pressing, Europe has the power to blunt Russia, as long as America is there in NATO to knit together the European military forces scattered across the continent.
I'll add that American leadership in NATO prevents a second threat from arising in Europe--the European Union. The EU is a proto-imperial state that seeks to strip away the prefix.
Yes, given time air defenses could expand to American cities as Trump would like. After all, Israel’s Iron Dome started out as protection for military and crucial sites only. But public demand for protection from periodic terrorist attacks compelled Israel’s elected leaders to expand its role. America is huge, making that much coverage impossible to afford in any short time frame. But the pressure to expand it could arise, too, if the American public feels similarly under threat.
But that debate is a long way off. For now, protecting America’s infrastructure for military power generation and projection—including space launch facilities—will be difficult enough. But necessary.
NOTE: I made the image with the Substack capability.