CONCORD, N.H. — Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said during a question-and-answer session Wednesday that he would like the United States to have the “equivalent of an Iron Dome,” the Israeli missile defense system, to protect against foreign threats.
There’s one issue: The U.S. doesn’t face the threat of short-range missile barrages from neighboring territory, which is what the Iron Dome is designed to neutralize. And while many experts argue the U.S. does need to do more to defend against next-generation missile threats, it’s hardly something that has gone unnoticed as Ramaswamy claims, with hundreds of billions of dollars and decades of development already poured into the project.
Ramaswamy said having something similar to an Iron Dome is “essential to protecting this homeland.”
“Russia has hypersonic missile capabilities ahead of that in the U.S,” he explained after NBC News asked why Iron Dome would be necessary in the United States.
“We’re vulnerable to new threats on our homeland. Those hypersonic missiles can reach the United States of America today. We’re badly vulnerable,” he added.
Ramaswamy said the “foreign policy establishment has spent our national defense budget on everything basically other than defending the homeland.”
The Iron Dome intercepts short-range surface-to-surface rockets, according to Israel’s Ministry of Defense, typically improvised projectiles made by Palestinian militants from water pipes and other materials that happen to be at hand.
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A 2023 Congressional Research Service report explained that the Iron Dome’s targeting system and radar are designed to intercept projectiles fired from 2.5 to 43 miles away, intercepting them on their descent phase if their trajectory puts them on a course to hit a populated area. Each battery is only designed to defend a maximum area of about 60-square-miles, a little less than the size of Washington, D.C.
If the United States were to enact this type of defense system to cover the entire country, it would need thousands of batteries, and it would likely not protect against the long-range state-of-the-art hypersonic missiles to which Ramaswamy is referring.
Ramaswamy’s campaign did not respond to a request for clarification about what he said.
While Ramaswamy claimed “the neocon liberal hegemonic worldview” has “completely missed” missile defense, the U.S. has actually poured billions of dollars into missile defense development over decades, with neoconservatives often being the most vocal champions of the cause.
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The Pentagon has an entire agency with a roughly $10 billion annual budget dedicated to missile defense, called the Missile Defense Agency, and multiple systems are already deployed to protect the U.S. against threats from places like North Korea. And hypersonic missiles — both developing offensive capabilities and methods to defend against them — are a major focus of defense research at the moment.
But the technological challenges of intercepting cutting-edge weapons from major nation-states like China are enormous, going far beyond Israel’s challenge of intercepting homemade Palestinian rockets.
During the Cold War, when the U.S. faced the constant threat of nuclear annihilation from the USSR, administrations under both parties devoted enormous resources to building a vast network of early warning radar systems in remote parts of the Arctic and long-range missile interceptors, with mixed results.
The Pentagon has already budgeted hundreds of millions for the next fiscal year to develop hypersonic defense capabilities, even though it’s unclear if any country has actually been able to produce a true hypersonic missile. For instance, Ukraine has been able to shoot down multiple Russian missiles that President Vladimir Putin touted as hypersonic using U.S.-supplied Patriot missile interceptors.
In fact, missile defense has often been lampooned by the critics as a neoconservative boondoggle, especially after Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, which included experiments in shooting down missiles with space-based lasers, failed to produce desired results and earned the derisive nickname “Star Wars.”
Even though recent events in the Middle East have made the Iron Dome part of everyday vernacular, this is not the first time Ramaswamy has brought up the topic on the trail.
During a campaign event in September in Dublin, New Hampshire, Ramaswamy said, “We need an Iron Dome in this country … for missile defense systems that we're badly lacking. China and Russia have space-based capabilities on the offense. We have neither space-based offense nor defensive capabilities.”
Katherine Koretski and Emma Barnett reported from Concord, and Alex Seitz-Wald from Camden, Maine.
