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ACAST helps creators launch, grow and monetize their podcasts everywhere. ACAST.com. Welcome to the World in 10. In an increasingly uncertain world, this is The Times' daily podcast dedicated to global security. Today with me, Alex Dibble and Tom Noonan. Donald Trump has shown in his first two weeks back in the White House that he's still got a taste for eye-catching policies and his plans to strengthen America's military are no different.
One of his executive orders that he signed is to create an Iron Dome defence system for the US. Now, the Iron Dome is the nickname given to the anti-missile system used in Israel. You might have seen those really striking photos of it lighting up the night sky with those bending, glowing threads as it shoots down missiles over Israeli cities. It has been very effective at protecting civilian areas since it was introduced in 2011. And now Donald Trump wants his own version.
But is it actually possible to create that sort of system to cover the whole of the U.S., from Boston and New York all the way to L.A.? Our guest today is Massau Dahlgren, a missile defense specialist at the think tank for the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Just to begin with, Massau, can you just describe to us what the U.S. can do at the moment? What sort of systems are already in place, in other words? Thanks for having me.
The current U.S. missile defense posture is overwhelmingly targeted at limited threats, ballistic missiles from North Korea and Iran. At the same time, we have an architecture of very capable missile defense
that are designed to handle the lower tier, mid-tier ballistic missiles, cruise missiles that come at our forces deployed abroad and allied populations. The change is a focus on bigger threats to the U.S. homeland, right? Peer states like China, peer states like Russia are starting to look at using non-nuclear weapons, long-range conventional missiles like what they're using, for example, in Ukraine,
to target US populations. And so it's about securing US airspace, right? This question of, do you build a limited defense for a limited ballistic missile threat? Or do you build a comprehensive one for the new generation of hypersonic threats, drones, cruise missiles, things that fly lower than ballistic missiles that hold targets here at risk? What is Donald Trump proposing then to tackle these new threats from countries like Russia and China?
I think when you look at the structure of the proposal, right, there's one bucket, which is continuity. There's one bucket, which is new stuff. And then there's a third bucket, which is studies, right? When we're looking at what's being studied,
Right. There's a proposal to look at space based interceptors. That's been something raised during the first Trump administration and studies. Right. When it was looked at, there were a lot of features that made it unfeasible, particularly the launch cost of launching all of these, the amount of coverage that you would get and those systems inability to deal with those low end drone and cruise missile threats, which just fly too low for something in space to deal with.
That's in the study bucket. When you're looking at systems that are being proposed, you know, I think the most valuable contribution is cruise missile defense. This was something that was pursued heavily in the Biden administration for the past two years. And when we're seeing, you know, incursions from balloons from these really low flying threats, I think that represents useful and needed continuity.
And when we're looking now at investments that we need to make in existing systems, you know, you look at the purchases of air defense interceptors, missile defense interceptors in the current U.S. inventory. That is not up to speed with the level of threat that we are seeing from Russia and China. And so I'm hoping that the next administration and Congress look pretty deeply at what the actual inventories we need are to deal with the next generation of missile threats.
What's been the reaction in the U.S. to his Iron Dome plan? Has there been the sort of opposition we've come to expect when it comes to Donald Trump? Well, I think these ideas have bipartisan consensus in the United States and also multinational consensus.
You know, it's not just the United States that's building up its missile defense capability against cruise missiles, drones, hypersonics, these lower flying things. But Japan, South Korea, Europe is looking at the European Sky Shield initiative. And so I don't think that this is unprecedented for the U.S. to be looking at securing its own airspace a little bit better than it has in the past.
Obviously, we know the Iron Dome as part of Israel's defence infrastructure, but Israel is geographically pretty small as a country, and the threats it's facing are quite clear, even if there's a lot of them. You've got Iran in its proxies, so they're coming from the east, the north in Lebanon, and from Gaza. The US, meanwhile, spans a whole continent, and the potential threats come from all over, whether that's across the Pacific or across the Arctic, I suppose, from Russia, potentially via Europe.
Scaling up the Iron Dome to defend the whole of the United States, to the layman that seems incredibly ambitious, let's put it that way. But is it actually possible given the vast resources the US has at its disposal?
No, I don't think you could cover the entire U.S. with literal Israeli Iron Dome systems, right? I think you can infer that Iron Dome is used as a metaphor or as a general phrase for comprehensive missile defense, right? What we're talking about here are space-based sensors that can see much further out that cover pretty much the entire Indo-Pacific theater. And I think a really important component there is
is the emphasis that's been put on allies here, right? Britain, for example, is a major partner with the U.S. for missile early warning already, right? We have
radars that are cooperated with the UK to warn of incoming nuclear attacks, right? Hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles, those kinds of missiles fly under the horizon of those kinds of radars. And so increased investment in airborne sensors that could see those cruise missiles earlier, space-based sensors, which could see those hypersonic weapons earlier. I think that's a worthwhile thing for decision makers to be looking at.
Masao, you talk about space sensors, and indeed in response to Donald Trump's executive order, Russia has complained about the US militarising space. But doesn't a system like this, doesn't militarising space in any way sound a bit far-fetched? I mean, Ronald Reagan was talking about this sort of thing in the 80s with the Star Wars programme, and the US government spent hundreds of billions trying to develop something similar, and it's
It's never got anywhere near the potential that was promised. So is it any more realistic now? When we're looking at space-based capabilities, right, there's echoes of Star Wars, right, in terms of space-based interceptors. Where there aren't echoes of Star Wars are in space-based sensors, right? That's been an effort that's been pursued for two administrations already, three administrations maybe, right?
satellites are already in orbit. You know, the government is already well on its way to making essentially a government starlink for looking, seeing missiles coming in and tracking them. Space-based interceptors are further off, but that's something that needs further study. The interesting divergence from prior attempts to deal with this problem is this emphasis on limited, limited defense, right? You can't defend...
all at once with infinite money, right? You have to pick and choose what priority areas you defend and how much you're going to spend doing it. You know, prior estimates for developing a national cruise missile defense were in the hundreds of millions of dollars because they made the assumption that you would be using expensive, you know, F-35s,
around the clock to cover entire coasts of the United States against cruise missiles. I think everybody is recognizing that's not feasible, but that it's certainly possible to at least defend major cities, major population centers, major areas of strategic interest against these threats with other systems. And I think the test case for whether this will work or not is how well the army manages to achieve that
in Guam, which is a major budget item and ongoing program for air and vessel defense. And talking there about the choices the US government faces and Congress faces, surely this is going to take an enormous amount of money away from strengthening things like the US's ability to go on the offensive and stay on the front foot compared to Russia and China.
If you read the executive order, they want to look at offense, defense integration, right? And so-called left of launch capabilities. That is capabilities to strike, you know, adversary missiles before they're launched. So the capabilities that you need to develop to do defense, the technologies that go into them have become the backbone of our modern strike conversation.
The sensors that you need to do defense, right? That became the technological underpinnings of offensive strike, right? Determining, you know, what to hit.
So I actually think that offense and defense are inextricably linked in that way. But the second thing I'd say is defense increases the decision space for leaders and allows for off ramps where there otherwise wouldn't be. Right. When Iran was trying to attack Israel with those ballistic missiles.
Suppose some of those did hit population centers. I think there would have been a lot more incentives for really decision makers to escalate the conflict and for things to get out of control. The fact that you can prevent something from happening, you can create diplomatic off ramps for conflict.
And setting all of that aside, military campaign planning is a difficult art. You need certainty that you're going to take out this runway within six hours in order to proceed with the next steps of your plan of attack.
If you create uncertainty in Russia's mind, China's mind, any adversary's mind, that that's achievable in the early stages of a conflict, you create uncertainty on everything else that's planned in the campaign. So I think these things are complementary. I don't think that you can have one and not have the other. Massoud Olgren from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies. Thank you for joining us. That's it from us. Thank you for taking 10 minutes to stay on top of the world with the help of The Times. We'll see you tomorrow.
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