One of the significant changes that the incoming Trump administration is contemplating in defense policy is the development of Space-based weapons. These weapons will not just consist of missile defense systems, such as once proposed during the Reagan administration’s SDI program, but defenses for American satellites. Both Russia and China are developing weapons that would attack satellites that the United States military relies on in the event of an armed conflict. The Trump administration would also create weapons that would strike at an enemy’s space assets, according to Roll Call.
The space-based missile defense system would be added to sea and land-based system to provide a layered protection that would attack ballistic missiles at any point in their flight. The idea of missile defense has achieved a new resonance with the increasing hostility of nuclear powers China and Russia and the prospect of rogue states such as North Korea and Iran gaining missiles that could use weapons of mass destruction.
Another approach the incoming administration will look at will be space based weapons that could strike targets on Earth. One idea that has been kicked around for decades is a system that would consist of a tungsten projectile with thermal protection and a navigation system.
Upon command, these “rods from God” as they are poetically called would reenter the Earth’s atmosphere and would strike a target, even one in a superhardened underground bunker, at 36,000 feet per second, obliterating it. The weapon could be used to take out Iranian nuclear sites, penetrating antiaircraft defense systems.
That defense spending is going to increase under President Trump is a given.
The American military has been cut and hollowed out under the Obama administration, an increasingly dangerous policy in a world with multiple threats to the security of the United States. Space weapons would constitute a standard American approach to war fighting, using technology as a force multiplier to defeat a nominally superior enemy. Space weapons that can strike targets on the ground would obviate the necessity of forward deploying a lot of air, sea, and land assets, saving money and lives in the process.
