The proposed Iron Dome for America, it's likely going to take a lot of time and a lot of money.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.

Among President Trump's many executive orders is one calling for a, quote, next-generation missile defense shield.

The White House calls this the Iron Dome for America.

The order says it should defend against all sorts of missile attacks and include space-based interceptors, which could potentially act as both sensors and weapons. It reminded retired U.S. Air Force Major General Robert Latif

of a Reagan-era program he worked on, the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, known to its critics

as Star Wars. I asked General Latif if the U.S. has the technology to make this defense shield work.

Yes and no.

Yes, we do have the sensor technologies.

We have the launch technologies.

Whether or not we have the technologies to lash it all together and make it work, I think is an open question.

And President Trump has compared this to the Defense Shield used in Israel.

Israel is about the size of New Jersey.

The United States is about the size of the United States.

Many New Jersey's.

You know, we're talking about something way bigger and different kinds of protections too, right? Yeah, so I think the use of the

term iron dome for this one was really misleading, because the Iron Dome in Israel is a, it can

protect an area of about 150 square miles against targets that maybe are 35 or 40 miles away,

short-range ballistic missiles that aren't going very fast and don't have any countermeasures necessarily.

There's even some controversy over how good it is. Israel swears by it. Others say maybe it's not as good as they claim.

So the Secretary of Defense has been instructed to come up with a plan that includes a budget. How much would

something like this cost? So I look at what was been proposed in the EO, and I have actually

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