We officially live in the age of missile defense.
The US-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, American forces and other countries around the region.
If not for these defensive systems, the United States and Israel probably wouldn’t have dared launch this military campaign — or at the very least would have done so knowing that Iran could exact an enormous cost on Israeli civilians and allied military 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 nearly 30, according to the latest reports.
It left a massive crater, 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.
As of Monday it had 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 US 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 just one-off tactical successes: They have a major strategic effect.
Iran built its stocks of missiles to deter its enemies and to protect its regime, its weapons programs and its broader geo-political project.
By blunting its missile threat, US and Israeli defenses opened up a vista for what President Donald 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 Iranian 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 like these 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 seemingly out of a 1950s-era comic book, although that technology is still in its infancy.
Missile 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 attacks didn’t result in 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 United States, Israel and Gulf allies will run out of interceptors before Iran runs out of missiles.
All of this suggests that here at home, missile defense should be a matter of bipartisan consensus, as basic as deploying radar or anti-aircraft weapons.
In a hangover from the Reagan years, though, progressives persist in believing that nothing is more preposterous or dangerous than wanting to be able to shoot down ICBMs directed at the United States.
The Trump administration should be racing to get as much of the Golden Dome system — especially its space-based elements — deployed as quickly as possible.
If a Democrat is elected president in 2028, he or she will be determined to stop the program in its tracks, and keep the American homeland 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, US and Israeli defenses have so far proven dominant.
X: @RichLowry
