School of War - Ep 173: Tom Karako on America’s Iron Dome

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Tom Karako, Senior Fellow and Director of the Missile Defense Project at CSIS, joins the show to discuss what President Trump’s executive order on missile defense portends. ▪️ Times      ���      01:15 Introduction     •      02:08 Dawn of missile defense      •     05:50 Ups and downs     •      10:40 Arguments against      •      14:50 Capabilities       •      18:45 A layered defense     •      22:20 Cost      •      26:42 Tried and tested       •      28:21 A “Pearl Harbor” Pearl Harbor  Follow along on Instagram or YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

One of President Trump's first acts in office has been to issue a sweeping executive order directing the creation of a, quote, American Iron Dome. What does that mean? What's the gap between the missile and air attack threats we face and our capabilities? What would an American Iron Dome look like? Let's get into it. It is for war this Milwaukee invasion of November 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the great situation in France. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing ground.

We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, Substack, and Twitter. And feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today. Tom Caracow, he's the director of the Missile Defense Project and a senior fellow with the Defense

and Security Department at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Tom, thank you so much for joining the show. Great to be on, Aaron, a longtime listener, first time color. Well, you are the perfect person to talk to for today's subject, which is President Trump's executive order calling for a Iron Dome for America. We're going to get into what the state of play for missile defense is. is in 2025 what the prospects of enhanced missile defense for the United States actually are and what the criticisms are. But first, you know, you really are the expert here. I thought maybe we could

start with a little bit of history. Obviously, I mean, in the order, the president makes reference to Ronald Reagan. But Reagan wasn't the first to work with missile defense capabilities in the United States. Take us back to the beginning. When did not just air defense, but ballistic missile defense, missile defense become a topic of the American National Security conversation and, you know, talk a little bit about Nike and Sentinel and those Cold War efforts. Yeah, exactly. So look, folks were trying to, we're thinking about how to knock down missiles basically when they first began to get missiles or began to be shot at by missiles. And so you go back to the 1940s, really. And so I think about the attacks on London and some of the early

engagements of V-1s, for example, which were, you might say, the Shahid drones of World War II. Well, those were actually engaged to some extent by British aircraft. I know somebody whose grandfather did this, flying up to them and kind of tipping them over on their side to disrupt them. So that's a form of missile defense, in that case, cruise missile defense. And then likewise, in the years after that, you began to see, really in the 1940s, the U.S. DoD began to come up with concepts, with ideas, Project Bambi, which I think came out shortly after the Disney movie, which was an acronym in the 1940s for, you know, getting after what we today talk about is

a boost phase missile defense. And so the concepts, the ideas have been around for forever, the physics of a purely ballistic missile haven't changed that much, although the missiles themselves have become increasingly less ballistic. And so other physical principles certainly apply. You know, I'm calling you from Hutsville, Alabama, Redstone Arsenal, which is where Werner von Braun, you know, father of the Apollo program, among other things, and also the German missile, before we, before he captured him at the end at World War II, did so many, so much work. And that's why this is Rocket City. And that's why so much of the histories down here from the Saturn 5 and everything else. So throughout the 50s and the 60s, as you alluded to Aaron, you know, the United States actually had deployed a number of, of missiles, surface-to-air missiles that were in the first instance designed to kill Soviet bombers. And so you mentioned the Nike family, the Nike and Zeus and the Hercules and Nike Hercules and Ajax and all these sorts of things, which actually in many cases had, or at least had the capability to have nuclear warheads. You know, we didn't have precision guidance or the kind of other terminal seekers that we are kind of commonplace to

day, really commonplace globally. And so we made do with large or rather maybe small nuclear weapons to get over that. We had nuclear air-to-air missiles to kill other bombers. I mean, heck, they had the Davy Crockett, you know, nuclear bazooka, for that matter. And so that was in the early days how we, and by the way, also the Soviets, the Russians today still have some nuclear-armed interceptors around Moscow, again, to compensate for what would today become accepted as the ability to, as sometimes in the past, derisively described as hitting a bullet with a bullet. But it turns out we've gotten pretty good at not just hitting a bullet with a bullet, but hitting a very particular spot on a bullet with a bullet. That's just how much the investments of the 70s and the 80s

in terms of precision guidance have evolved. And this really is, has come to be the ultimate precision guides challenge. I always thought that being the guy who had to fire the nuclear bazooka was a pretty raw deal. I feel like that was the job that I personally would have volunteered for in the 50s, you know? So we're going to come up. We're going to come up to precision in the present day, but just to linger a bit on

the history, because I think it's really interesting and important. Nixon, essentially, comes to conclusion. Well, I'll let you characterize the precise conclusions he comes to. But under Nixon, we back off of this stuff dramatically. Why? Yeah, so look, we really began our broad nuclear arms control agreements with the Soviets, kind of with the Kennedy administration, Johnson, you get some test ban treaties, you get the Salt 1 agreement, the NPT treaty at 1969, for instance. And then in 1972, you get two things.

You get the Salt 1 agreement, but you also get the ABM treaty. They were signed on the same day in 1972. one of them was sent to both houses of Congress, Salt, as a congressional executive agreement, the ABM treaty sent to the Senate for an Article 2 treaty that really lingered for a long time. And that was, it was a perception, I would say, that we were in some respects losing the arms race and we didn't have a whole lot to lose if we shored up the restriction on anti-ballistic missile, ABM technology on the grounds that, well, they may have more, but if we can basically kind of lock in a relationship of, in McNamara's words, assured destruction or something like that, that might, that might be stable. Well, that was probably in retrospect a bad idea. There were a small number

of people who thought it was a bad idea at the time. I'll say the United States actually deployed a system in North Dakota, Grand Forks, briefly to guard some of our ICBM fields. The original ABM treaty actually allowed up to 100 interceptors to protect both a city and an ICBM field. And we deployed that for about six months. And then we decided that a nuclear tipped interceptor was not really a very good idea, that it would, among other things, a potential fracture side problems, but also blinding our own radars. So it kind of was very quickly not deployed. That was a safeguard system as well.

So you get there. The Soviets had some defenses. We had basically none. And then you get to the 1990s, the Soviet Union goes away, but the Russians are still kind of attached to the missile defense restrictions. But you also see proliferation. And the 90s were a discussion about the Pakistanis and the Iranians and above all the North Koreans. And that really drove the Bush one, George W. Bush administration to get out of the ABM treaty. And they did so in 2001. We actually formally. in 2002 is when it took effect. And that was in the months after 9-11. So think about that. In 9-11, September, it was, I think it was in December of 2001 when President Bush says, hey, this is not working. We have to worry about non-state actors and all this other stuff. And so we got out of it in 2002, deployed what is now called the GMD, ground-based mid-course defense system in Alaska and later California. And that's still deployed, still deployed today. So lots since then, but that's kind of some basics.

It just, I want to spend, I want to like map out what actually exists today in more detail. But first, you know, arguments against missile defense systems have always seemed to me to involve sort of recurring, in my view, foundational errors. I'm curious to know how you view it. And, you know, you can take this back to the 70s. But, you know, the argument, for example, that protecting American cities, American population centers from, you know, massive. nuclear attack is just not cost. It's just not something that we can afford when balanced with other, you know, defense needs, not to mention, you know, the possibility you could achieve to turns to other means. Okay, let's let's even accept the premise for sake of argument.

Let's accept the premise that it's too expensive to protect everything from massive, overwhelming, you know, nation killing nuclear strikes. I'm not saying I accept it, but let's take it for purposes of argument. It seems to me that that argument overlooks the fact that actually much more limited missile defense could at various points in our history really contribute to deterrence because we might anticipate that enemy nuclear strikes are not going to be necessarily countervalues, city killing, massive efforts to murder every American. But rather they're going to go after military targets. They're going to go after military targets with their military assets.

And the opening stages of any kind of awful war like this are going to involve real strategic thinking and real strategic targeting. And so maybe you would consider defending the things that can go after with your more limited missile defense systems and thus contribute to deterrence. Your things are going to be harder to kill, making your war making potential better. And so contributing to deterrence. And it always, you know, once you're talking about that, now you're talking about, quote unquote, now you're thinking about fighting a nuclear war. Like now you're trying to plan a nuclear war, which seems like an immoral enterprise in and of itself. Do you, do you, does that seem fair to you?

Like, there always seem to be sort of strands of arguments that come up over. over and over again in these debates over the, over the generations. I'm curious to know if you agree. Yeah, look, there's a lot of perennial arguments on this front. I mean, on the one hand, there's the criticism, but it won't work. On the other hand, very frequently by the same people, it won't work, but it will be provocative anyway, which has always been a little bit non-logical to me. But I guess I always think it's important to give your debating opponents the strongest argument and to give them the benefit of the doubt as opposed to, as opposed to to merely be engaged in rhetorical devices.

And I think that this is, I spend a whole lot of time on this subject. Missile defense is hard. It's very hard. And I also really stress that it's very easy to have this conversation and talk about mutually assured destruction and nuclear war, this kind of stuff. And I just don't believe that that's where the missile defense conference is or has been for a number of years. And that's why I'm constantly directing attention to.

the prospect of a version of what you just said there, Aaron, which is the specter of non-nuclear strategic attack. That in today's environment, it's not a small number of nuclear weapons on Conis versus a large number of nuclear weapons on Conis, but rather strategic effects being achieved via a bunch of strikes without any radiation being released. And I think when you frame the argument that way, I think you begin to better appreciate the phenomena today. And look, I love the history. I cut my teeth on all the history of this stuff, and I'll talk about it all day if you want. But the phenomenon we've faced today is the specter of non-nuclear strategic attack. And I would say that to your point, limited air and missile defenses of various stripes serve a strategic purpose in raising the threshold for attack and thereby helping to disabuse our adversaries of non-nuclear strategic attack that they think they might be able to give.

get away with short of a nuclear reprisal. Look, even the Biden administration considered, but then ultimately did not embrace a no first use option in terms of nuclear nuclear weapons. And they did so for a reason because they don't want to encourage the other folks to kind of do lots under the nuclear threshold when we have so many extended deterrence responsibilities globally, for instance. And so I think that where the technology is today, and frankly, this was the Reagan's innovation that kind of pick up on the history there a bit is. he moved away from the nuclear interceptors to try to apply that precision guides technology that we kind of take for granted today and that we've seen in high relief over the past

number of years. And we can talk a little bit about the recent history, which has been truly unprecedented. Yeah, no, let's do it. And I just supposed to say, I mean, your characterization just now, I wholeheartedly agree with. It was actually one of your colleagues at CSIS, Seth Jones, who I owe this observation to be pointed. out in the conversation we were having with some others that, you know, at some point in the recent past, there had been this taboo that, you know, no one's going to attack the sovereign territory of a nuclear power. You know, that would be, that would be crazy. And it just doesn't really seem to be holding anymore. I mean, Israel is obviously a sort of the recurring exception to

that rule. But, you know, the Ukrainians have invaded Russia. Russia's got a pretty big nuclear arsenal. So the notion, so it follows from that, the notion that in some sort of conflict, whether it's in the Western Pacific or anywhere, that involves the United States directly. The notion that the homeland would be somehow immune from strikes because the expectation is, oh, you must the hair on the head of one person in America, and we're going to respond with overwhelming nuclear force. That dynamic is not playing out in other parallel examples, and the enemy may not expect it to play out in our example, and we may take an attack. So, yeah, it sounds eminently reasonable. Talk to us about what does exist today. What is the system that

we've got, what are its capabilities and what are, I mean, obviously there are, I'm not sure it's fair to say there's a gap. I mean, the capabilities are very limited and targeted. What, what exists? Yeah. So I would just, first of all, pull the thread on what you just said there, Aaron, that is the proliferation and the availability, rather, the supply of lots of precision guided munitions that has contributed to lowering the threshold for use that you pointed to in. Well, you know, these have become no longer boutique weapons. It used to be that there was no greater correlation between intuiting a country's desire for a nuclear weapons program than getting a ballistic missile program. That used to be a very strong correlation.

That's so it is that availability and supply of that non-nuclear missile strike capability that makes them easier to use. And so we saw on April 14 of last year, you know, 550 project. DELS coming from multiple azimuths, all at least designed to arrive at the same time, truly remarkable kind of kind of attack, instantiation of what I've been calling complex and integrated attack for more years that I can count. And so in terms of what's available, well, the important thing here is that the supply of air and missile defenses is, thanks to the last 40 years post-SDI, is no longer American idiosyncrasy, that the demand signal, as well as the suppliers of, let's just say, the French stamp tea system, the German iris tea, the South Korean several SAM programs,

the Japanese have several air and missile defense programs, both in cooperation with the United States and others, and on and on. Those are probably the primary suppliers, with the exception of Israel. Again, I've been working with the United States since I think since 1986 on this, and they have, Israel has the Iron Dome that everybody knows, David's sling above that, and then the Arrow 2, which is a blast frag, Arrow 3, which is hit to kill Exo Atmospheric, and then they've got some of other programs in development. And then coming to the United States, we have, and I really think it's important to look at both the Army and the Navy as well as the national assets. So on the Army side, everybody knows the Patriot, or rather the Patriot family of Interceptors. The Patriot was in Desert Storm. But that was a different system.

That was a different missile that we have today. That was the missile formerly noted CMD that in the Bicentennial of 1976, they thought it would be a good idea to turn into the acronym Patriot. And but what was put into play, put into the field to shoot down scuds in 91, was really an air defense missile. It wasn't a fit for purpose. So the PAC 2 and PAC 3, on the other hand, are really four feeder ballistic missiles and the like. And then we've got.

at the THAA terminal high altitude area defense. That's deployed today in South Korea and Guam and actually Israel now, by the United States. The Emirates have had THAAD and they've used it actively in combat successfully against Iranian missiles. And the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is buying more THAAD batteries than the U.S. Army will have here very, very soon. So that's that. On the Aegis, the Navy side of the house, you really have a whole family as well. And it starts with the close-in weapon system. That's the Gatling gun for cruise missiles coming in.

You've got the extended range C-Sparrow. You've got SM2, SM6, an SM3 that hits things outside the atmosphere. And then we've got our national ICBM killers. That's the GMD system that's up in Alaska and Hawaii, that we've got some new development work going on as well. So there's lots of programs. It's really because these have become weapons of choice. There's lots of different tools on the tool. to contend with them. So what then is the scope of what the president is is actually directing? I mean,

the first thing out the gate in the order itself is, you know, a direction to the Secretary of Defense to submit a reference architecture and capabilities-based requirements for a next-generation missile defense shield. That sounds more extensive than what you just described. Talk us through what's actually being called for here. Yeah. So it does have a 60-degree, basically homework assignment to come back and and figure out what's sort of the art of the possible for various capabilities. I think to its credit, it talks about the full spectrum of air and cruise missile and ballistic and hypersonic glide kinds of threats. That's a necessity. The diversity and the number of these threats has just been metastasizing. We got to get after all of it.

So much, but not all of what I was listing off earlier, much of it was for the ballistic threat. Again, there's different tools in the toolbox for different problems. And we, for instance, the whole main cruise missile threat. That is a massive vulnerability. I like to say, if we're going to build an Iron Dome for America, we ought to start just in the way that Iron Dome is the lowest tier for Israel's layer of defense. We need to start with air defense and we need to start with cruise missile defense. These are the threats that, you know, Zelensky faces on a weekly basis

that have hit Israel and other places in the Middle East over the past 10 years or so. So don't neglect air and cruise missile defense. The Germans had the V1s as well as the V2s. We've got to shore that up. And unfortunately, it's been an area of great neglect. But there's some aspirations there, not merely for more space sensors, which, of course, is tremendously important, but also for space interceptors. And so you'll see the SECF come back, probably with some kind of plan.

It may be an R&D plan. It may be something a little bit more ambitious. We'll see. It's been curious to see people costing this. when we don't know what this is just yet. Right. But I think, I'll say that I believe that this is the year where we are going to have a different national conversation about space-based capabilities and missile defense,

putting those in the same sentence. And the reason is that we have begun, it's begun to sink in the implications of treating space as a warfighting domain. That what we're going to see is the acknowledgement of what you might call space fires. So offensive and defensive fires, kinetic and non-kinetic, in from and through space. And I believe that space-based intercept of, let's just say ICBM, the legacy ICBM problem, I believe that will become a subset of the emerging space fires that now that we've had space force, we've had space command, and their thought is maturing and that it's becoming recognized that we need this capability.

I believe it will, but we will back our way into that capability because we're going to thinking more seriously about spaces orifying domain. Let me, let me ask you this. I mean, one obvious line of criticism of really any plan that could be answerable to the president's directions here is going to be cost. You know, we are in a moment where we have a number of people calling for increases in the defense budget. Senator Wicker is out there calling for 5%.

You know, if this were fully implemented, presumably, and again, I agree, we don't know what the this is. But let's say, you know, a good faith effort to satisfy. the president's direction here were implemented. It's going to be expensive. Give us a sense of what realistic implementation, I mean, the way the order is written, I mean, it's calling for,

you're kind of looking into everything in the kitchen sink here, you know, boost phase, terminal phase, you know, there's all sorts of stuff here. They're going to have to be decisions made about what to prioritize, what to really lean into, what not. From Tom Caracow's point of view, what does a from the hip sketch of a reasonable execution here actually look like? Yeah.

So I think it's critical to answer this question is to identify which parts of the threat spectrum were most focused on. Is it the cruise, air? Is it the hypersonic? Is it the ballistic? I think it's, it's this executive order has been something of a Rorschach test that people when they kind of think about as where does their mind go? Does it go to, okay, compute the cost of four,

hundred space-based interceptors, the launch cost, the life cycle cost. That's one way. Another way is, you know, what would it take to get even a thin, or a thin defense of a small number of locations in Conis and Guam, say, for cruise missiles? And then likewise for the hypersonic thing, which unfortunately, a hypersonic defense effort is, it's absolutely critical, but it's, but it's anemic. So the answer is you have to, you have to close the door and the window. You can't just pick one.

We can't tell the Chinese, hey, we're ready for you on the ICBMs, but you're not allowed to use crews and hypersonic stuff. That doesn't work that way. So we have to deal with the full threat spectrum because a thoughtful adversary will come up with complex, which is to say different things, and integrated and structured attacks to hit you with multiple things all at the same time. It's not just picking one instrument. And that's what we saw on April 14. And what we could face from China will be in order of magnitude greater. than what we saw on April 14 of last year. So what I would say is the first dollar goes to increase sensors in space.

And you saw that in the executive order reference and probably frankly, command control and the integration and data fusion to make sure that we're able to use the sensors we have today and are adding adequately. I would prioritize that first and foremost for the full spectrum of threats over the horizon radars for say cruise missile defense in the homeland.

So we at least can see these things coming. We are unfortunately blind to so much of the threat spectrum of cruise and hypersonic that we can't even fire a missile off to go shoot something because we don't necessarily see it or can't see it adequately in the first place. That's kind of where we are. I'll say our cruise missile defense report from 2022 basically predicted what became the Chinese spy balloon problem is that we had not tuned the algorithms of our radars for NORAD to look. look for things that moved slowly as opposed to that looked like at ICBM or looked like a bomber. And so the data was kind of filtered out. So we've got a lot of work across the board on the C2 and the algorithms and the sensors to first get that. That's the problems closest to the boat.

And then we're going to work through the various engagement modes. The thing is it's in some respects, the rocket. the surface-to-air missile, the divert and attitude control system that literally steers a kill vehicle to its target. In some respects, that's the easy part. But you first have to tell it where to steer, where, at what point in space to go, at what millisecond to be, to arrive at that space. And that's why I tend to emphasize those pieces of the puzzle. I will say that we have costed various improvements like this. We caught built and cost to the defense architecture for Homeland Cruise missile defense.

And once you frame the problem correctly, if you don't try to defend everything, and so to your comment earlier, I wouldn't try to defend everything here, I wouldn't. Like Israel, sometimes you let the threat go and you really focus on some really critical assets to defend as opposed to everything. When you frame the problem and scope it down that way, it becomes to be far more tractable than if you try to defend everything. Yeah. I am hopeful that the two rounds of missile attacks on Israel and the pretty successful effort to repulse them in both cases has, if not put to rest entirely, at least quieted down the argument that it's just, missile defense is just not going to work. You're going to spend all this money and it's not going to work. I mean, that's the premise of that Annie Jacobson book that came out on nuclear war. It opens with this scenario right where one North Korean missile, I think there's four attempts in the scenario to shoot it down.

they all fail. Washington gets nuked to me. We go to war. Let me, here's the last question. On that front, Aaron, I think you're right. I will say, I mean, I used to debate people in the previous decade about whether it worked and all this kind of stuff. And I was assured confidently. Tom, you don't understand Russian missiles are just so sophisticated. You know, the ABM tree legacy has haunted our capabilities. And by the way, that's true to some extent still. But the last couple years have really disabused that notion. And you don't hear people saying that. And the reason is we're shooting down and the Ukrainians are shooting down all kinds of Russian stuff.

Not perfectly. A lot of stuff's getting through. But the extent to which Ukraine is still sovereign today is because of air and missile defense and the Ukrainians put the Patriot on their currency as a reflection of that. So I would also add that every single, every single American and Israeli missile defense system from the C-WIS to the C-WIS to the standard missiles to the fat of patriots all the way up. Every single one has been employed in combat against missiles fired and anger and done so successfully in the past five years, every single one. Last question for you. I'll ask you to put on your literary hat here and just paint us a scenario. You were talking about structured, thoughtful attacks a few minutes ago. What's the kind of

thing we might see from an adversary directed at, I mean, your dealer's choice. Homeland, Guam, whatever you want to say. And just give us a picture of the kind of complex attack we might see. And thus the kind of architecture that you would want to prioritize or we might think about prioritizing as we lean into missile defense. Yeah, I would focus on complex and integrate attack. And so you would want to attack the United States or anybody. You would want to blind us. You would want to basically do the seed mission, the suppression of enemy air defenses.

You would want to blind the United States, take out our eyes, take out our radars. You'd probably use cruise missiles to take out our big ballistic missile radars, things like that. And then you would follow it up with low flyers, with cruise missile attacks or aircraft or something like that, whether it's Okinawa or Guam or what have you. I would want to do it without any radiation being released because I would want the United States to not respond in a nuclear way. I would, and you know, people talk about a cyberprohard. and a space pro harbor. I worry about a pro harbor, pro harbor. The purpose of which,

the purpose of which was to take out our bases for Philippines as well as Hawaii, take out our air bases, take out our ships so that we could not project power and they could do what they wanted to do in the Pacific. As you think about China, I mean, they would, if I was them, I would want to, at the lowest viable level, shore up the joint force within Conis. I would hit our points of departure aircraft and ports and things like that and not kill a lot of Americans, not cause a lot of damage, but just enough damage to say, you know, this is a conflict that you don't want to get into. You don't want to bring the United States into this over Taiwan or the Philippines or what have you. And so I would want to structure an attack that achieves that very quickly and decisively and that puts us in a very place and therefore affects our political calculus.

Tom Caracow of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Quick conversation, but an important one. Thanks for coming on quickly here to help us understand developing events. And hopefully not your last time in the show. Thanks for listening and come back and be a guest again. Great. Great to be with you. This is a nebulous media production.

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