Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. In May, President Donald Trump shared his vision for protecting the U.S. from the threat of nuclear strikes by drones and ballistic crews and hypersonic missiles. The idea? A golden dome which would cover the country with three layers of air

defenses. Following the launch of missiles in Iran, the idea of having a robust defense system

here at home is getting more attention. Here to share his insight on missile defense and nuclear

deterrence is Tom Carrico, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Thanks for joining me, Tom.

Great to be with you. What does the architecture of a national missile defensive system or Golden Dome look like? Would this be primarily space-based technology, or is there more to it than that?

Yeah, there's certainly more to it than that.

And again, it's important to keep in mind that we have a handful of systems already in

place today to defend the United States against, especially the rogue state ICBM threat

in particular.

That's called the ground-based mid-course defense system.

But you specifically asked about the architecture.

And so I think

it's important to kind of recognize there that there's a number of sensors, there's space sensors,

there's lots of ground-based radars. And the very beginning of the kill chain here is the first

of the detection of a missile launch, the tracking of that, the figuring out, is this a threat,

and where is it going? That's primarily a sensor and computing kind of a problem.

And then figuring out, okay, we have certain interceptors.

How does one create a fire control solution?

How does one tell them where to go at what moment to be at a particular point in space to kill this thing?

And then, of course, we have the ground-based interceptors up in

Alaska that are there to kill this. But as you note, this is not just about the rogue state

ballistic missile threat. As we've seen in Ukraine and the Middle East, there's all kinds of other

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