Golden Dome – Dr. Rich Swier

Trump’s announcement of a plan to create a “Golden Dome” for the entire US, an anti-aerial defense system, able to detect and intercept rockets, missiles, drones, and airplanes, has been mocked by some — after all, if Trump proposes it, it must be treated as ridiculous — is not being mocked at all by those who know what they are talking about. Leading that list is the CEO of Israel Aerospace Industries, Boaz Levy, who hopes that his company will play an important role in Golden Dome’s development.

More on Israel’s hope to have a major role in the development of the “Golden Dome” can be found here: “IAI CEO: US should pick us to build the Golden Dome missile defense shield,” by Yonah Jeremy Bob and Anna Ahronheim, Jerusalem Post, August 16, 2025:

The US should select Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to develop its Golden Dome missile defense shield because they built the Arrow defense system together, IAI CEO Boaz Levy told the Magazine in a recent interview.

Levy said, “One of the lessons from the war [with Iran], Operation Rising Lion, is that collaboration is the name of the game. There is no doubt that you cannot win big wars without partnerships, which also go operational.”

The IAI CEO stated, “There is a lot of initiative in US-Israel cooperation, which especially manifested itself during this war. The active Israeli defense apparatus has multiple layers against ballistic missiles.

“A lot of the materials are made in the US, but the brain is in Israel. It would be natural for the US to use it because it’s an entirely American system,” he explained.

Further, he stated, “The Golden Dome initiative of President Trump has components where we are already cooperating. There are two pieces: land-based and sea-based defenses; and defenses from space.

“Space has two pieces: identification and tracking of the threat; and shooting down the threat,” remarked Levy.

Next, Levy noted that the Arrow 3 brings all the pieces and purposes of the relevant missile defense functions and goals together for use by the distinct branches of the military.

In addition, he said, “US Space Force General Michael Guetlein was appointed [to run the Golden Dome program]. He has the capability to lead the missile defense and space components. They need to bring a vision” and decide the details and the price tag that they want to help companies like IAI, which will bid for the project, to frame their proposals.

“But the technology is all very possible.”…

Tom Friedman and Nicholas Kristof, both know-it-all columnists for the New York Times, lead the brigade of scoffers, but one of the world’s great experts in missile-and-rocket defense, CEO Boaz Levy of Israeli Aerospace Industries, knows that the Golden Dome is no impossible fantasy, but with the right amount of materiel and money from the U.S., and the brainpower of Israeli scientists to supplement those of American scientists, is entirely possible.

Some European states, especially the U.K. and France, that are now planning to recognize a “state of Palestine” at the UN General Assembly meeting in September if Israel has not by that point agreed to end the Gaza war, have also threatened the possible cutting off of arms sales to Israel. They may find, in true cutting-off-your-nose-to-spite-your-face fashion, that it is Israel that could, in response to those states’ putting an embargo on weapons for Israel, cut off its technological assistance to the European Sky Shield program. Israel needs European weapons less than European countries need Israeli weapons.

Israel’s anti-missile technology — David’s Sling, Arrow 2,3, and 4, Iron Dome — has been proven on the battlefield to be spectacularly effective. No European arms manufacturer can boast of its weapons performances having been tested on the real-world battlefield, as Israeli defense firms so obviously can.

That means that a lot of IAI’s sales of multi-mission radar systems are to countries that are diplomatically at odds with the Jewish state. Some of those buying Israeli radar systems are bound to mute their hostility, and may even come to see their weapons supplier — the Jewish state — in a more favorable light.

“We see a reflection of the threats that we see in Israel in theaters around the world. And it’s not about the technology being used; it’s about the threats posed,” he said, explaining that in conflicts around the globe, there is an increasing use of ballistic missiles, rockets, drones, and UAVs.

And it is precisely against these — ballistic missiles rockets, drones, and UAVs — that the Israelis have built an integrated series of weapons, that provide a layered defense against short, medium, and long-range threats.

Does anyone doubt that if the U.S. builds that Golden Dome program to protect the entire country from rockets, missiles, and drones, that Israel will prove to be the one indispensable foreign partner in the program, giving back in military expertise ten times the value of the American weaponry it receives?

AUTHOR

Hugh Fitzgerald

Russia, North Korea, and China this week called President Trump’s plan to build a “golden dome” missile shield to protect America “dangerous” and “destabilizing.”

It’s an ambitious project, and the goal of having the missile shield go operational before the end of his term in January 2029 is even more so.

Plus, the President has teased the possibility of expanding Golden Dome to protect Canada as well — if, of course, the Canadians accept his proposal to become our 51st state.

For reasons that defy rational thought, the arms controllers and most leftists believe missile defense is anathema.

During the Cold War, they argued that unless the United States and the Soviet Union were guaranteed to utterly destroy each other if they used nuclear weapons — a doctrine known as Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD — there could be no strategic stability.

As I describe in my latest book, The Iran House, the 2006 Israeli war with Hezbollah showed the absurdity of the MAD doctrine. Israel at the time had no missile defenses, and sent its citizens (and visiting journalists) scurrying into air raid shelters each time they detected a Hezbollah missile launch.

The Iranian-backed group fired off 4,400 missiles and rockets at Israel that summer, and only the grace of God prevented widespread casualties.

In the current war that Hamas launched on October 7, 2023, Hamas and its allies have launched tens of thousands of rockets into the Jewish state, to great psychological and economic effect but thankfully causing few human casualties, because of Israel’s now-robust missile defense systems.

The Israelis have developed layered defenses, with Arrow 3 dedicated to intercepting long-range ballistic missiles fired by Iran or the Houthis in Yemen, and David’s Sling, which catches short to medium range missiles. Iron Dome, the best-known Israeli missile defense system, is used to intercept the short-range rockets used by Hamas and Hezbollah.

Presumably, President Trump’s “Golden Dome” network would not need to worry about short range missiles, only ICBM’s or missiles that could be fired from containerized launchers placed on commercial cargo ships off our shores.

I can remember when touring Strategic Defense Initiative facilities in 1986 (and meeting Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb, at Lawrence Livermore National Nuclear Laboratory), being shown the revolutionary supercomputer that was making SDI possible.

Advances in technology at the time allowed that supercomputer to be carried around in a briefcase. Today, you could probably get that much computing power into something the size of a thick credit card.

Quantum computing plus Israel’s pioneering efforts in developing missile defense make me optimistic that Golden Dome could indeed become a reality.

Just this past week, Israel lifted the veil on a series of new laser-based missile interceptors, releasing video for the first time of a fixed laser system intercepting a drone. Called “Iron Beam,” this system has apparently been operational for several months already.

Iron Beam is part of a more extensive “Magen Or” network of lasers, known in English as Light Shield. When those systems become fully operational, they will dramatically decrease the cost of defending against cheap rockets and missiles, while expanding the ability of the IDF to protect Israel’s civilian population.

One Iron Dome interceptor costs around $55,000, and sometimes the Israelis launch two or three against a single incoming target. By comparison, a shot from Iron Beam or Light Shield will cost a few dollars — basically, the price of the electric charge.

With the massive expansion of drone warfare we have seen — not just from Iran, but in Ukraine — such systems could be a game-changer.

I discuss this as well as the deadlock in the US-Iran nuclear negotiations, and the prospects for peace in Ukraine, on this week’s Prophecy Today Weekend.

As always, you can listen live at 1 PM on Saturday on 104.5 FM or 550 AM in the Jacksonville area, or by using the Jacksonville Way Radio app. You can listen to the podcast later here.

Yours in freedom,

RELATED VIDEO: The Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield

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