ArcaMax

We officially live in the age of missile defense.

The U.S.-Israeli war against Iran has been the showcase for missile-defense systems -- interceptors, radars, and complex command and control -- that are extremely robust and have largely defanged Iran's foremost military threat to Israel, U.S. forces and other countries around the region.

If it weren't for these defensive systems, the U.S. and Israel probably wouldn't have dared launch this military campaign, or at the very least would have done it knowing Iran could exact an enormous cost on the Israeli population and U.S. forces.

We've seen the toll of one successful Iranian ballistic missile strike. A missile that hit a synagogue in the Beit Shemesh area where people were sheltering killed nine people and wounded more than 40, according to the latest reports. It left a massive crater and destroyed cars and set fire to other buildings in the vicinity.

Imagine that destruction multiplied dozens or hundreds of times a day in Iranian retaliatory attacks.

That's what Tehran has been going for with its massive barrage. So far, it has fired more than 500 missiles and more than 800 drones, and gotten tragic but minimal results from expending a significant share of its overall arsenal.

That is thanks to the integrated, highly effective U.S. and Israel missile-defense systems -- most famously, in Israel's case, Iron Dome -- that have knocked down almost everything thrown their way.

These intercepts aren't one-off tactical successes, but have a major strategic effect.

The purpose of the stocks of Iranian missiles is to deter its enemies and to protect its regime, its weapons programs and its broader geopolitical project. By blunting the missile threat, defenses opened up a vista for what President Trump hopes will be the most emphatic counter-proliferation campaign in recent memory.

In other words, missile defenses may make it possible to ensure that the Iran regime never gets a nuclear weapon.

We now know that all the scorn that has been poured on missile defense over the years was perverse and wrong.

Defenses were supposed to be technologically impossible. Not only do we see their practicality demonstrated every single day, Israel has begun deploying anti-missile and anti-drone lasers out of a 1950s-era comic book, although the technology is still in its infancy.

Defenses were supposed be destabilizing. In reality, they have allowed Israel room for maneuver -- last year, when Iran launched missile barrages against the Jewish state, it could carefully calibrate its response since the missile attacks weren't mass-casualty events.

Missile defense is such a key aspect of the current war that one of the biggest questions in the conflict is whether the U.S., Israel and the Gulf states will run out of interceptors before Iran runs out of missiles.

All of this suggests that in the U.S., missile defense should be a matter of bipartisan consensus, like deploying radar or anti-aircraft weapons. But in a hangover from the 1980s when they mocked Ronald Reagan's vision of a missile-defense shield, progressives persist in believing that nothing is more preposterous or dangerous than someone wanting to shoot down ICBMs directed at the United States.

The Trump administration should be racing to get as much of its Golden Dome defense system -- especially the space-based elements -- deployed as quickly as possible. If a Democrat gets elected president in 2028, he or she will be determined to stop the program in its tracks and keep the U.S. as vulnerable as possible to an adversary's missiles.

The age of missile warfare began dawning with the advent of Nazi V1 and V2 rockets in World War II, and missiles featured prominently during the Cold War. Now, the interaction between offensive and defensive missile systems is an unavoidable part of warfare, and we should be very glad that in the Iran war, U.S. and Israel defenses have so far proven dominant.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2026 by King Features Syndicate