The idea is simple and complex at the same time: ballistic missiles fired at targets anywhere in the United States would be detected and intercepted before they could strike the ground.
This is the concept of US president Donald Trump’s plan to build the “Golden Dome for America”, a missile defence programme that would come with an exorbitant price tag even by American standards.
But military experts in the US believe that there is a next-generation threat level coming from rogue states like Iran and North Korea as well great powers like China and Russia that justify a reorienting of western missile defence strategy – not only in the United States, but also in Europe.
“Great powers like China and Russia are investing in long-range strike capabilities. This is a complex threat we need to be able to defend against,” the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Patrycja Bazylczyk told Euronews.
“That’s why it is important for Europe to bolster its missile defence system,” said Bazylczyk, a researcher at the Missile Defense Project with the Washington-based think tank.
William R. Forstchen, military technology researcher at Montreat College, North Carolina is even blunter. “It’s a no-brainer to me. We need a new strategic defence system. We need it, Europe needs it,” he told Euronews.
Forstchen is the author of “One Second After”, a study of the power of missile weaponry to destroy the entire continental US.
“I’m also really concerned about Europe. An Iranian EMP missile could wipe out the entire power grid of western Europe,” he added.
EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse. When “detonated”, an EMP weapon produces a pulse of energy that creates a powerful electromagnetic field capable of short-circuiting a wide range of electronic equipment, particularly computers, satellites, radios, radar receivers and even civilian traffic lights.
Forstchen said an EMP attack would set off a cascade of deadly events. The first necessity people would lose is water, followed by food supply and medication. Then, disease would set in.
Long-term survival, he added, would depend on being in the right place at the right time with the right food supply.
According to Tomas Nagy, an expert for nuclear, space and missile defense at the GLOBSEC think tank, the Golden Dome initiative, still in its early stages, faces its own set of considerable challenges: production bottlenecks, component shortages and typical Washington turf battles within the defense community.
In Europe, the challenge is different. Should there be a large-scale conflict with Russia, missile threats would be just as, if not more, critical given Moscow’s “limited ability to project ground forces deep into NATO territory,” Nagy said. “In such a scenario, Russia would very likely rely more heavily on stand-off missile strikes.”
Bremerhaven, Antwerp or Hamburg could be targeted – former army general
A concern that is shared by Ben Hodges, who commanded the US Army Europe from 2014 to 2018.
“Threats from Russia are already there, think about their sabotage action in the Baltic Sea. In three to four years, their next step will be airstrikes on Bremerhaven, Antwerp or Hamburg to see how NATO responds,” he told Euronews, adding: “For sure, there is a need for missile defence.”
Yet, missile defence has long been an orphan of European defence policy. Most countries lack enough interceptors to thwart massed attacks, and many have donated precious batteries to Ukraine.
Only recently have European countries reacted. The European Sky Shield Initiative (ESSI), initially proposed by then-German chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022, is a project to build a ground-based integrated European air defence system which includes anti-ballistic missile capability. As of today, 24 European states participate in the initiative.
But the ESSI pales in comparison to the Golden Dome project US president Trump wants to be operational before his term ends, which experts like Patrycja Bazylczyk consider “ambitious”.
“There is certainly political momentum right now, but the project needs the cooperation of future administrations as well,” she said.
Whether the successors of the Trump administration will continue to support and fund the Golden Dome is anybody’s guess.
Trump estimates the total costs to be $175 billion, $25 billion of which are allocated in the current budget proposal.
Yet, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated a cost somewhere between $166 billion and north of $540 billion for the space-based components alone.
What if the project is scrapped after Trump leaves the White House? William Forstchen shrugs it off. “Whatever amount you spend by then is useful.”
