- Israel says missile defense system is 90% effective
- Building such a system in U.S. is estimated to cost $2.5 trillion
President Donald Trump will sign an executive order today to create an ‘Iron Dome’ style defense system in the United States, DailyMail.com has learned.
It would be an American version of the famed Israeli missile defense system.
Incoming Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth hinted the order was coming when he walked into the Pentagon on Monday, his first day on the new job.
‘Today, there are more executive orders coming that we fully support, on removing DEI inside the Pentagon, reinstating troops who were pushed out because of COVID mandates, Iron Dome for America,’ he told reporters. ‘This is happening quickly.’
Trump had vowed to build such a system upon his return to the White House.
‘We will replenish our military and build an Iron Dome missile defense system to ensure that no enemy can strike our homeland,’ he said this summer at the Republican National Convention.
‘Israel has an Iron Dome. They have a missile defense system,’ he noted. ‘Why should other countries have this, and we don’t?’
Israel’s Iron Dome system is designed to intercept and destroy short-range rockets and artillery shells fired from distances of two to 43 miles away.
The system was ’90 percent effective’ in October when Iran fired 200 ballistic missiles at Israel.
But defense experts warn what makes the system work for Israel won’t apply to the United States.
Each Iron Dome system can defend an area of roughly 150 square miles. Israel is 8,600 square miles.
But the United States is 3.8 million square miles, meaning America would need to deploy more than 24,700 Iron Dome batteries to defend the continental U.S.
At $100 million per battery, that would be approximately $2,470,000,000,000 – or $2.5 trillion.
Also the system is designed to protect Israel from its nearby neighbors.
It is not designed to handle the long-range missiles from adversaries across an ocean – say Russia or China.
An analysis from Defense One found that the Iron Dome system couldn’t even protect Mar-a-Lago from missiles fired from the Bahamas, some 80 miles away.
The U.S. has invested heavily in the Israeli system, giving nearly $2 billion. It’s unclear if there is support in Congress to invest in something similar for the U.S.
What is the Iron Dome?
The Iron Dome is an all-weather mobile system in Israel that is made up of at least 10 missile-defence batteries strategically distributed around the country.
The device is made up of three main sections: a radar detection system, a computer to calculate the incoming rocket’s trajectory, and a launcher that fires interceptors if the rocket is deemed likely to hit a built-up or strategic area.
It uses a sophisticated radar to detect incoming airborne objects such as a drones, rockets, and missiles, it sends the information back to a command-and-control center.
Here, the threat is tracked to assess whether it is a false alarm and the potential destination of the flying object.
Each truck-towed unit then fires radar-guided missiles to blow up short-range threats like rockets, mortars and drones in mid-air.
The system fires the interceptors – just 6 inches wide and 10 feet long- at the incoming threats that seem most likely to hit an inhabited area.
Each Iron Dome battery consists of three to four launchers that can each carry up to 20 Tamir interceptor missiles.
The batteries can neutralise threats launched from up to 43 miles away, while at the same time ignoring projectiles that are projected to strike unpopulated areas.
In late 2012 Israel said that it hoped to increase the range of Iron Dome’s interceptions, from a maximum of 43 to 155 miles away and make it more versatile so that it could intercept rockets coming from two directions simultaneously.
The 10 Iron Domes placed throughout the country are able to defend up to nearly 60 square miles of land – protecting countless civilians and critical infrastructure.
The system was developed by state-owned Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and Israel Aerospace Industries and was upgraded in 2012, but the details of the changes were not made public.
The United States backed the initial project with a $200,000 grant in 2006.
The David’s Sling and Arrow Defences
The Iron Dome is just one of Israel’s three-tiered missile defence system along with the The Arrow, and David’s Sling.
Israel’s Iron Dome system garners the most attention of the country’s air defences as it’s used most frequently to bring down unguided, short-range rockets often fired by Hezbollah and Hamas.
However, the country’s air defences are made of three critical ‘overlapping’ systems that can blast threats out of the skies at different ranges.
The targeting of guided ballistic missiles that travel at higher altitudes, longer ranges and faster speeds requires a different system from the Iron Dome to take them down.
For this, Israel uses both ‘David’s Sling ‘and the ‘Arrow 2 and 3’ home-grown air defence systems which are built to destroy medium-range and long-range ballistic missiles.
The Arrow system developed with the US is designed to intercept long-range missiles, including the types of ballistic missiles Iran launched at Israel.
Both the Arrow 2 and 3 systems are capable of handling much longer-range missiles like Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM’s) that will likely travel at altitudes beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, a capability similar to the US military’s THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) air defense system.
The Arrow 3 system is believed to have a range of 1,500 miles and can reach an altitude of 100 miles.
The Arrow 2 is designed to explode near a missile to bring down an incoming missile, but the Arrow 3 is a hit-to-kill missile.
The systems are designed to engage threats both in and outside the atmosphere, and they operate at an altitude that allows for the safe dispersal of any non-conventional warheads.
State-owned Israel Aerospace Industries is the project’s main contractor, while Boeing Co. is involved in producing the interceptors.
David’s Sling, also developed with the US, is meant to intercept medium-range missiles, such as those possessed by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The two-stage missile has no warhead, it destroys incoming ballistic missiles with the sheer force of impact, making it what is known as a ‘hit- to- kill’ which has been characterized as hitting a bullet with a bullet given the high velocities involved.
How effective is the Iron Dome?
Iron Dome’s effectiveness has improved since it first successfully took out a hostile projective in April 2011, and has gone on to achieve a reported success rate of around 90 per cent, according to Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.
In a large Iranian attack in October 2024, most of the roughly 180 missiles were intercepted by the defensive weapon before reaching Israeli territory, while others were shot down by the United States and other allies.
It has also been proven to be highly effective in recent years, with its abilities especially highlighted in 2021 after militant groups in Gaza fired at least 4,000 rockets during the 11-day May war.
In the first 24 hours of the conflict 470 rockets were fired with Iron Dome system intercepting about 90% of the rockets heading to populated areas within Israel.
In the US, Lt. Gen. Henry A. Obering wrote in Defence News: ‘Iron Dome has stopped over 2,000 rockets fired at Israeli population centres with a remarkable success rate, an achievement that also shifted US thinking about homeland missile defence.
‘Iron Dome is the most proven and affordable option against very short-range fire.’
He hailed it as a ‘gamechanger’.
On the battlefield during Operation Pillar of Defence in November 2012, and when used in Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the system had 84 per cent and 91 per cent rates of success, respectively.
But things become more complicated if the drones are flying so low that the radar can’t detect them.
Israel has hundreds of interceptor missiles at its disposal, but the Iron Dome has come under immense pressures as seen on October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel with a barrage of thousands of missiles.
Hamas said it launched 5,000 rockets in the initial attack and Israel’s military countered by saying just 2,500 rockets were fired.
‘That quantity was simply too much for Iron Dome to manage,’ said the Modern War Institute report.
This suggests the Iron Dome has a limit to the number of rockets it is able to intercept, and if that number is exceeded, the rest of the rockets will permeate the system, according to a Forbes report from 2021.
Just two days after the October 7 massacre, the Israeli government asked the US to provide more precision-guided munitions for its combat aircraft and more interceptors for its Iron Dome missile defense system, according to a US official.
