President Trump’s Missile Defense System Aims to Be a Major Science Driver

Within days of President Trump’s issuance of his Executive Order calling for the development of a U.S. missile defense system, the Defense Department’s Missile Defense Agency issued a Request for Information (RFI) to U.S. industry for ideas on how to implement President Trump’s E.O. The defense industry website “Breaking Defense” Missile Defense Agency asks industry for American 'Iron Dome' concepts - Breaking Defense calls the RFI, “a surprisingly fast turn around on a Pentagon program.”

The RFI is very broad and calls on industry to provide concepts by February 28 on a range of technologies to “detect and defeat the threat of attack by ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles, and other advanced aerial attacks”.

The RFI is not exhaustive but is intended to survey what concepts already exist in industry that might be useful in advancing the program and what research and development programs can contribute to it. 

Undoubtedly to fully implement the program called for in President Trump’s E.O., new technologies must be developed. This will be a spur to U.S. industry and the scientific community to push the frontiers of technology which will certainly have spin-off effects far beyond missile defense. Considered in conjunction with Energy Secretary Christopher Wright’s Order for a “Golden Age of American Energy” the Trump administration is moving quickly to put the U.S. on a fast track to a scientific and technological revolution.