https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12424/american-missile-defense
The 2018 new national strategy of the United States requires the development of an effective, robust layered missile defense, including an architecture for a hypersonic missile defense capability. The United States strategy also includes a plan for developing a space-based missile defense intercept capability, which is indeed revolutionary.
“The United States needs to develop the capability and the capacity to deal with everything that could be thrown at us by an Iran or North Korea and to blunt any initial missile salvo from China and Russia.” — Former Missile Defense Agency Director Lieutenant General Trey Obering.
“I don’t compare the cost of an interceptor to the cost of an inbound missile. I compare the cost of the interceptor to the value of an American city… The current missile defense budget is $12 billion a year, says General Obering. “If you look at it in that regard, it’s a very, very affordable program.”
To critics, a missile shield allows the U.S. to be a “bully, to effectively use the offensive sword and do so with impunity by hiding behind a defensive shield.” But that is nonsense,” according to General Obering. The United States and its allies cannot just sit back and take hit after hit.
The Trump administration is in the final leg of its missile defense review which will be soon be forthcoming. In anticipation of that report, General Trey Obering, a former Director of the Missile Defense Agency, recently gave a “look into the future” and how he saw what he termed the coming “revolution in missile defense”.
Up to this past year, the legal guidance for our missile defenses has been that they would be limited and designed to stop only rogue state missile threats. However, the 1999 Missile Defense Act was amended in 2017 to eliminate the term “limited”.
This will now allow the United States to build stronger defenses that are needed, rather than those arbitrarily circumscribed by critics of missile defense, who were insistent when the bill passed the U.S. Congress in 1999 that any defenses be strictly “limited”. Their support was necessary to pass the legislation in the Senate, so at that time, the restriction was accepted.