In 1983, President Ronald Reagan announced he was launching a Strategic Defense Initiative, popularly known as “Star Wars,” with the goal of rendering nuclear weapons “impotent and obsolete.” He imagined lasers in space shooting down Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles, effectively creating a space shield to save America from nuclear Armageddon. More than 40 years and hundreds of billions of dollars in missile-defense spending later, the United States has not come close to achieving Reagan’s lofty aspirations. Space lasers did not prove practical. Neither did a madcap scheme known as Brilliant Pebbles for lofting thousands of interceptors into space. The Airborne Laser — a Boeing 747 equipped with a laser — got to the testing phase before being canceled as too impractical. The United States did develop and deploy effective defenses, such as the Patriot battery and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system, for use against short- and medium-range missiles. But attempts to stop a nuclear missile strike on the United States have never advanced much beyond President George W. Bush’s deployment in 2004 of 44 ground-based interceptors in Alaska and California. This system was designed to defend against a few missiles launched by a rogue state, not a massive nuclear attack from Russia or China. And it isn’t clear the system could achieve even that objective: In tests, the interceptors hit their targets only 50 percent of the time.
Obviously, calling Patriot or THAAD "effective defenses" is akin to me calling myself Albert Einstein and this is just the start. Trump does want a second issue of SDI, this time also designed to intercept ... hypersonic weapons. You know, all those orbital lasers and other piu-piu devices. Even Atlantic Council--yes, this wet dreams generator machine--study is kinda subdued in its expectations, albeit still missing critical fact--a paradigm shift:
The objective of homeland missile defense is not an impregnable missile defense shield for the country, but rather sufficient defenses to counter adversary missile threats of coercion—to enable US regional defense strategy—and defenses adequate to ensure the survivability and endurance of US nuclear retaliatory forces and nuclear command and control against any combination of adversaries. This requires some tailoring of the missile defense mission depending on the strategy objectives and missile capabilities of potential adversaries. The study outlines three categories of threats or scenarios for which missile defense must provide a solution: first, there are the smaller and possibly undeterrable threats presented by accidental and unauthorized launches as well as by countries such as North Korea that have limited nuclear capabilities; the second category is limited Russian and Chinese missile threats meant to coerce the United States (to provoke but not enrage); finally, there is the larger scale (but still limited) preemptive attack against US nuclear forces and command and control designed to prevent nuclear retaliation.
The reason being that the US lost arms race on THREE critical tracks:
1. Anti-missile defense, having nothing comparable to S-500/550, S-300V4 or A-235 Nudol.
2. Hypersonic weapons ranging from tactical-operational to strategic. US has none.
3. Survivable satellite constellation in case of real war.
The gap is growing and to even narrow it somehow requires way more than Power Point presentation.
There is far too much stress placed on the efficacy of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system with its GBIs and radars for the defense of the homeland. Originally intended to undergo regular upgrades after its initial deployment in 2004, modernization of the GMD system has failed to keep pace with advancing missile threats. Moreover, the GMD system was never meant to stand alone against the threat—but rather as part of a layered approach that contemplates defenses in other phases of flight to compensate for the GMD system’s shortcomings and to provide additional intercept opportunities.
"Additional intercept opportunities" are impossible in the US today, because it is not just technology or arrogance, it is the wrong view of the war in general and not understanding how to fight it other than in PR and propaganda realms. In related news, Russians are having a field day with this Iron Dome thingy. I wonder what kind of data sets Patriot PAC3s provided Pentagon from the SMO zone. Nah, I am being facetious.