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Missile Defense Order Revives Programs
March 2025
By Xiaodon Liang
In its first week in office, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump approved an executive order expanding missile defense efforts, signaling a fundamental shift in missile defense policy and calling for the revival of interceptor and sensor development programs.
The Jan. 27 order adopts a new policy of deterring and defending against “any foreign aerial attack on the Homeland,” marking a departure from the long-standing policy across administrations that U.S. missile defense investments should be designed primarily to manage threats from rogue states.
In its 2019 Missile Defense Review, the first Trump administration endorsed the traditional policy, stating that the “United States relies on nuclear deterrence to address the large and more sophisticated Russian and Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile capabilities.”
But other aspects of the 2019 review have been resurrected in the new executive order, such as a call for “Development and deployment of space-based interceptors capable of boost-phase intercept.” In its fiscal year 2020 budget request, the first Trump administration sought to fund studies of particle-beam and kinetic space-based interceptor concepts, although these were later dropped in the following year’s budget.
The new executive order also revives plans for a missile defense “underlayer and terminal-intercept capabilities postured to defeat a countervalue attack.” The concept of an underlayer stationed in the continental United States, adapting the Standard Missile 3 Block IIA interceptor and the Aegis ship-based missile defense system, also was recommended in the 2019 review and included in the fiscal 2021 and 2022 budget requests.
In both of those years, Congress blocked most of the funding for the Missile Defense Agency’s proposal to adapt the Aegis and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense systems to fulfil the underlayer role (see ACT, January/February 2022).
The new executive order directs the defense secretary to produce within 60 days a “reference architecture” for implementing a plan to defend against “ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries.”
In addition to steps toward developing space-based and underlayer interceptor capabilities, this document should include plans to accelerate the Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program, according to the order. The Office of Management and Budget is instructed to price out the missile defense expansion so the proposals can be considered for inclusion in the fiscal year 2026 presidential budget request.
Following rapidly upon the executive order, the Missile Defense Agency issued a request for information to defense contractors on Jan. 31 that seeks ideas on how to meet the broad requirements of the Trump administration’s ambitious plans.
On Feb. 5, Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), introduced a bill to authorize $19.5 billion in fiscal 2026 funding for a broad set of missile defense initiatives beyond the scope of the executive order. Most of the proposed spending, $12 billion, would go toward expanding the ground-based midcourse interceptor field at Fort Greely, Alaska.