March 31, 2025 - Epoch Times
20:01
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| President Trump is looking to make the biggest change to our nation's defense capabilities in at least 60 years. | |
| And he's looking to do it up in space. | |
| You see, after launching the Space Force as the official sixth branch of the U.S. military, as well as re-establishing the Space Command during his first term in office, well, now, President Trump is looking to expand our space military capabilities To include hundreds or perhaps even thousands of satellites, each one equipped with heat-seeking missiles that can fire and destroy nuclear warheads directly over our enemy nations. | |
| Meaning, instead of waiting until a missile comes out of Russia, out of China, out of Iran, or out of North Korea and it's on its way here, instead, this constellation of satellites, they can rain down missiles directly on any nation on Earth, Destroying the nukes right then and right there. | |
| This is really the nuclear war in space that Reagan famously envisioned. | |
| Except now, with advances in manufacturing, computing, and AI, it's actually happening. | |
| Let's go through it all together, right after you take a super quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this video can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| Now, to begin with. | |
| In his very first week in office, President Trump issued a dizzying number of executive orders. | |
| Included among them was this one here, an order directing the Pentagon to build an Iron Dome missile defense shield for America that can defend against cruise, ballistic, and hypersonic missiles, as well as any other advanced aerial attacks. | |
| Here's Trump speaking on the matter on the very same day that he issued that executive order. | |
| "To immediately begin the construction of a state-of-the-art Iron Dome missile defense shield, which will be able to protect the military." Protect Americans. | |
| You know, we protect other countries, but we don't protect ourselves. | |
| And when Ronald Reagan wanted to do it many years ago, luckily we didn't. | |
| We didn't have the technology then. | |
| It was a concept, but we didn't. | |
| And now we have phenomenal technology. | |
| You see that with Israel. | |
| We're out of 319 rockets. | |
| They knocked down just about every one of them. | |
| So I think the United States is entitled to that. | |
| And everything will be made right here in the USA, 100%. | |
| Now, as Trump referenced in that speech, the term Iron Dome immediately makes one think of Israel, where their Iron Dome missile defense system has proven itself quite effective over the past three years, being able to defend from missiles coming out of the Gaza Strip, out of Lebanon, as well as out of Iran. | |
| There are probably hundreds of videos like these circulating online, which demonstrate the system in action, shooting down missiles in the sky over Israel. | |
| Now, the Iron Dome is perfectly suited for Israel in large part because of how small Israel is. | |
| For your reference, Israel is roughly the size of New Jersey. | |
| Or, to put it another way, Israel is 1 400th the size of the US. | |
| And so the Iron Dome is effective because, among other things, geographically there just isn't much to cover. | |
| However, what many people don't realize is that Israel's Iron Dome is only one aspect of their overall missile defense system. | |
| The Iron Dome is only meant to intercept volleys of relatively small rockets and mortars from coming in. | |
| For anything bigger, like cruise missiles, enemy aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and things like that, they have another system. | |
| A system that's called David's Sling. | |
| And then for even larger threats, like massive incoming ballistic missiles, Israel has what's known as the Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 anti-ballistic missile systems. | |
| When used in concert, these four different systems, they create a layered defensive shield, like concentric circles of defense, with each ring being protected by a different system. | |
| And it's exactly this type of layered system that President Trump wants to establish right here in the mainland U.S. Which is great, although frankly, at least to me, it's a little surprising that we don't already have it, given the fact that Israel's Iron Dome, their David's Sling, their Arrow 2 and their Arrow 3 systems, they were all either built by the U.S. or built in conjunction with the U.S. Regardless though, better late than never, we are about to get some defensive systems as well. | |
| Now, before we discuss what the U.S. missile defense system might look like in the near future, let's briefly discuss its history and what it looks like in the present day. | |
| Back during the Cold War, both the U.S. as well as the U.S.S.R. | |
| were producing hundreds of nuclear-capable ICBMs, which are intercontinental ballistic missiles. | |
| And then, notably, hundreds of Alongside the nuclear-capable ICBMs, both sides were also producing these anti-ballistic missile systems, Which were designed to intercept the other side's ICBMs. | |
| So they were building both attack as well as defense capabilities simultaneously. | |
| This was the famous Cold War arms race. | |
| Eventually, in 1972, both countries signed a treaty called the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. | |
| And as its name suggests, the treaty, it limited the number of defensive systems that a country could employ, which ostensibly removed the need to develop more nuclear weapons. | |
| However, The treaty, it did not actually stop Russia from building more nukes. | |
| And so in 1983, President Ronald Reagan, he announced something called the Strategic Defense Initiative, which colloquially became known as Star Wars. | |
| It was an audacious program, which intended to put interceptor missiles right up there in space, which could theoretically at least destroy ICBMs before they even reach the atmosphere. | |
| Here was President Reagan announcing the program all the way back in the early 80s. | |
| Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. | |
| It is that we embark on a program to counter the awesome Soviet missile threat with measures that are defensive. | |
| Let us turn to the very strengths in technology that spawned our great industrial base and that have given us the quality of life we enjoy today. | |
| What if free people could live secure in the knowledge ... that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies. | |
| I am directing a comprehensive and intensive effort to define a long-term research and development program to begin to achieve our ultimate goal of eliminating the threat posed by strategic nuclear missiles. | |
| Now, it's worth mentioning that, in retrospect, many analysts, including, I believe, every single professor that I had in college, they say that Reagan's Star Wars program was just a bluff intended to bankrupt Russia. | |
| At the time, the USSR economy was already, you can say, in shambles, and so, as they tried to keep up with America's Star Wars program, they just couldn't do it financially and, essentially, it just wiped out. | |
| That's one take on the program. | |
| If we look at the program at face value, it was actually brilliant. | |
| If the US could somehow deploy anti-missile systems in space that could shoot down ICBMs over the launch sites in the enemy nations, well, the deterrent effect would be massive. | |
| And Reagan's plan all the way back in the 80s, it was looking to deploy hundreds of these interceptors in space, in satellites, alongside thousands of interceptors on the ground. | |
| Basically, it was a holistic system combining space and ground interceptors to cover America no matter what. | |
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| However, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, the Strategic Defense Initiative, it lost its funding and it was never completed. | |
| Then from the end of the Cold War in 1991 up until 2001, not much happened in the realm of US missile defense. | |
| That was, of course, up until 9-11. | |
| In the aftermath of the terror attacks, President George W. Bush, he pulled the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and he established the ground-based Midcourse Missile Defense System. | |
| And it's exactly this system, set up in the aftermath of 9-11 by President George W. Bush, that America still uses to this very day to protect the homeland from any missiles coming from enemy nations. | |
| Here's how it works. | |
| Let's say a country like China launches a ballistic missile headed for the U.S. mainland. | |
| That missile, it goes through three unique phases on its way here. | |
| First, as soon as that missile is launched, it has the booster phase. | |
| This is when the missile is climbing up into the sky, it has fire and smoke coming out of it as it climbs in altitude, and this is exactly the phase where the missile is detectable. | |
| If you don't detect the missile during this initial phase, well, You're pretty much out of luck. | |
| It's going to be like finding a needle in a haystack later. | |
| Regardless, after the missile launches up high enough, the missile reaches the mid-course phase. | |
| Basically, it enters suborbital spaceflight and it cruises the space above our atmosphere in an arc on its way to the target. | |
| It then eventually reaches the apogee, which is the highest point of its flight path, before the warhead re-enters the atmosphere and makes its final descent to the target. | |
| And depending on where exactly this missile is launched from, this whole process can take less than 30 minutes. | |
| And so what that means in practice is that our missile defense system, it requires us to, within a 30-minute span of time, Let's go! | |
| Now, as you would imagine, that is not easy to do. | |
| Currently, the U.S. military, it has several radar centers located on sort of the west side of America, in Hawaii and Alaska, as well as over in the UK, in Greenland, Japan, as well as in the Middle East. | |
| These different sensors, they provide early detection warnings for when a missile capable of reaching the U.S. gets fired off somewhere in the world. | |
| They're, of course, specifically focused on the countries with nuclear capabilities, but they're monitoring the whole globe. | |
| Then, actually, working alongside these different ground-based radar systems, there's also two space-tracking surveillance system satellites that track missile launches. | |
| They're looking for that missile in booster phase heat signature alongside a constellation of eight integrated satellites that use infrared to detect launches as well. | |
| And that is, by the way, just what we as the public know about. | |
| There is, I would guess, probably a myriad of other systems, both in space, on the ground, and possibly even below the ocean, that we are just not aware of. | |
| Regardless, though, once one of these systems detects a missile capable of reaching the U.S., having been launched, well, there are ground-based interceptor missile sites on the west coast of the U.S. designed to shoot it down. | |
| There are two of these missile sites. | |
| Both of them are in the west coast. | |
| One is in Fort Greeley, Alaska, and then the other one is in the Vanderburgh Air Force Base in California. | |
| These interceptors, they basically have to shoot down these enemy missiles during the mid-course phase before the enemy missile reaches the apogee and begins its descent, which just by itself shows you how limited this system actually is. | |
| It's pretty much limited to the west coast facing China, Russia, North Korea, and the whole system. | |
| It's only designed to protect the U.S. from limited long-range ballistic missile attacks, meaning it can likely only handle a couple at a time. | |
| And it's also worth mentioning that the interceptor missiles are not 100% accurate. | |
| Now, how accurate they really are is kind of a secret. | |
| Nobody knows it, but I've seen estimates as low as 50%, meaning that if we're lucky enough to learn about a missile when it actually launches, it's still not guaranteed that we're able to shoot it down. | |
| Now, of course, we all hope that the U.S. has some kind of like secret technology in the bank that we just don't know about, but based solely on the U.S. government's own public statements, it doesn't look great. | |
| For instance, in a 2022 report, you can see it up on your screen, well, the Pentagon wrote the following, quote, The U.S. homeland ballistic missile defense architecture centers on the GMD system, which is the Midcourse Defense System, whose capabilities provide the means to address ballistic missile threats from states like North Korea and Iran. | |
| Though the United States maintains the right to defend itself against attacks from any source, GMD is neither intended for nor capable of defeating the large and sophisticated ICBM, air or sea-launched ballistic missile threats from Russia and China. | |
| The United States relies on strategic Now, that is not good to hear. | |
| Our current system, it can potentially protect us from North Korea and Iran, but not from China and Russia. | |
| For those two, instead of having a missile defense system that can protect the US homeland, we instead have to solely rely on the idea of mutually assured destruction through our second strike capability. | |
| You strike us, and we'll strike you back, potentially even twice as hard. | |
| Which is of course, I mean that's better than nothing, but obviously it's not the ideal. | |
| Especially as you have China building more and more ICBMs capable of reaching the US mainland, which is of course on top of Russia and their massive stockpile of Soviet-era nuclear warheads. | |
| And so all that is the background for Trump's new plan to develop the Golden Dome National Defense Strategy. | |
| Now, in terms of what this might look like as it gets implemented, well, let's unpack Trump's executive order as well as what the Department of Defense is doing as a response to that order. | |
| Up on your screen right now is the executive order issued by President Trump. | |
| It's titled the Iron Dome for America. | |
| And at its essence, what it does is that it lays out a list of deliverables that Pete Hexeth, as the new Secretary of Defense, must provide Trump within the next 60 days. | |
| Quote. Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the President a reference architecture, capabilities-based requirements, and an implementation plan for the next-generation missile defense shield. | |
| The architecture shall include, at a minimum, plans for... | |
| And then he goes on to list eight different criteria, such as systems that'll defend against next-gen missiles, a secure supply chain for all the different component parts of the system, and most notably, a plan for deploying space-based interceptors capable of intercepting incoming missiles during the boost phase. | |
| Meaning, space-based missiles that can destroy enemy missiles during the initial phase of launch. | |
| No longer will we have to allow missiles to reach high altitude on the way over here. | |
| Instead, satellites flying over Russia and China would, in theory, be able to destroy those enemy ICBMs right there in their home countries. | |
| Essentially, what this looks like in practice is that the US would have hundreds or perhaps even thousands of satellites up in orbit, with each one of them having interceptor heat-seeking missiles on board. | |
| And then, If any one of these satellites sees an enemy nation launching a missile that could potentially reach the U.S., they would just shoot it down directly. | |
| This is precisely what Reagan tried to do 40 or 50 years ago with the Star Wars program, which is a point that Trump actually mentioned during that recent speech that he gave to the joint session of Congress. | |
| Take a listen. | |
| As commander in chief, my focus is on building the most powerful military of the future. | |
| As a first step, I'm asking Congress to fund a state of the art. | |
| Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield to protect our homeland, all made in the USA. | |
| And Ronald Reagan wanted to do it long ago, but the technology just wasn't there, not even close. | |
| But now we have the technology. | |
| It's incredible, actually. | |
| And other places, they have it. | |
| Israel has it. | |
| Other places have it. | |
| And the United States should have it, too. | |
| Now, since Trump's executive order was issued, the Department of Defense has been racing to put the proposal together before the end of March. | |
| And actually, to that end, this right here is the Missile Defense Agency. | |
| It sits underneath the Department of Defense and probably, in my opinion, has one of the coolest logos in all of government. | |
| I mean, kudos to whoever designed that. | |
| The Missile Defense Agency is basically the R&D component within the Pentagon responsible for integrated missile defense systems. | |
| And following the executive order from Trump, they put out multiple vendor requests urging defense contractors to submit their concept of a new American Iron Dome defense system. | |
| Now, their request, it lays out a fairly tight window. | |
| Basically, any company looking to get this contract, they must submit their plan for an Iron Dome defense system that can get rolled out by next year, meaning 2026, and then be fully implemented within five years, by the year 2030. | |
| And so, let's see what ideas come out of this. | |
| The report from the Pentagon regarding this new program, it's due 60 days after Trump's executive order, meaning Trump's executive order was issued on January 28th, and so the Pentagon plan is due by the end of March, roughly March 28th, but then we'll see when it's actually going to be made public. | |
| Once it's made public, we can get an idea of the type of space architecture we'll be building in the near future to keep America's homeland safe. | |
| Basically, what type of constellation of missile-equipped satellites we'll be building. | |
| But let me ask you, It's not going to be cheap to build up something called the Golden Dome Defense System. | |
| I mean, it literally has the word gold in its name. | |
| And of course, launching hundreds or thousands of missile-equipped satellites could easily run into the hundreds of billions of dollars, if not literally the trillions of dollars. | |
| And so amidst the national debt crisis we're currently facing, and all the work that DOJ is doing to cut government spending, do you agree with this initiative? | |
| Do you think That the cost is justified if it's able to actually secure the American homeland from possible attacks? | |
| Or do you think that the price tag that's going to go along with this will be astronomical and beyond what we can spend? | |
| Or perhaps another question, do you think the astronomical price tag is the point? | |
| Sort of like what my professors told me the point of Ronald Reagan's space wars was, was just to bankrupt the USSR. | |
| Is this program maybe I don't know. | |
| If you'd like access to all my research notes, I'll throw all the links down into the description box below if you're the type of person that likes to dig into the weeds. | |
| And all I ask in return is that if you haven't already, as you're making your way down there to the description box, take a super short detour to smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this important information can reach ever more people via the YouTube algorithm. | |
| And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epic Times. |
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