- [Narrator] On January 17th, President Donald Trump was on hand at the Pentagon for the presentation of the Department of Defense's long overdue missile defense strategy review. In a brief speech, Trump laid out the major points of his administration's strategy for dealing with the potential threat from missiles, including the goal, as he put it, of ensuring that the military can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States from anywhere, at any time. 

While the strategy builds upon the weapons systems that the Missile Defense Agency and the military services have been testing, and in some cases, deploying, it also carries some vestiges of another Republican President's strategic defense plans, President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars strategy from the 1980s. President Trump's plan is essentially to build a missile wall in space, and to make US allies pay for it, but just as STI raised concerns over the US's treaty obligations, the new Trump-endorsed plan may throw long-standing international space law into question and lead to a space arms race as Russia and China seek to counter any strategic advantage the US gains from a space-based missile defense. 

The Trump missile defense strategy is focused on protecting US territory first, but it aspires to place weapons platforms in space that can, as Trump put it, terminate any missile launch from any country, accidental or intentional. He said that his proposed Space Force is going to be "a big part of the US's defense and also offense," and the Pentagon document states that part of the goal of the strategy is allowing the US to project power overseas, meaning that these systems will be used to protect US offensive operations from ballistic and other missile threats. 

By missile defense standards, the short-term goals of the strategy are relatively modest and incremental. They include expanding the deployment of ground-based mid-course defense, or GMD interceptors, at Fort Greely in Alaska, from 44 to 64, starting within four years, and the strategy review also states that the DOD may seek to expand the number by as many as 40 additional interceptors. The document also calls for the development of a new payload for the GMD interceptor, called the Multi Object Kill Vehicle, or MOKV, a system that would allow a single interceptor missile to engage multiple ICBM warheads, decoys, and countermeasures. 

The new strategy also calls for the rapid development of new anti-missile technologies, including the development of systems to detect and intercept cruise and hypersonic missile attacks, and it calls for the development of energy weapons, such as lasers, to shoot down missiles in boost phase. The F-35 and drones could be pressed into a boost phased missile defense role, either with air launched interceptors or airborne lasers and high energy laser research is also back on the table. Airborne lasers for missile defense are obviously not a new idea. 

During the Reagan SDI years, the Airborne Laser Laboratory, the Air Force's KC-135 based carbon dioxide laser test bed shot down a series of drones, air-to-air missiles, and cruise missiles in testing. Testing ended in 1984, and the ALL was retired, but the Gulf War renewed interest in shooting down missiles with lasers, and in the 1990s and the 2000s, the Air Force and the MDA would experiment with the airborne laser, or ABL, a megawatt chemical oxygen iodine laser, which flew aboard a modified 747 from 2002 to 2014. It was eventually abandoned as unworkable, after a poor success record in testing, after a cost of $5 billion. 

This isn't just the Air Force's game. Every service gets a hand in this plan. The US Navy is being called upon to expand its missile defense role, both at sea and on land, with the Aegis Standard Missile 3 Block 2B interceptor being deployed in numbers forward on more US ships and at Aegis shore facilities, with the potential addition of an Aegis shore defense system in Hawaii to defend against possible North Korean nuclear attacks, and the plan also includes moving forward with new land based radars and an at-sea radar that the Missile Defense Agency has been developing for years, as well as deployment of Patriot and THAAD missile systems by the US Army in times of crisis around the world. 

Just how much all of this plan will cost is anyone's guess. Including the emergency spending authorized by Congress after North Korean missile tests, Congress authorized over $14 billion last year towards missile defense, and that was for funding of relatively mature missile defense systems. With the new technologies that Trump is asking for, there's no way to tell how much they'll cost.