Retired Gen. Glen D. VanHerck participated in a “Fireside Chat” with Washington Times Columnist and former CIA Officer Daniel N. Hoffman during the “Golden Dome for America” event hosted by Threat Status on May 13, 2025, at the Ritz-Carlton, Pentagon City, in Arlington, Va.
[HOFFMAN] General Van Herk, You’ve written a lot of articles about the Iron Dome in the Wall Street Journal and recently in National Interest. And you’ve appeared on 60 Minutes discussing drone incursions into our homeland and the threat that is presented to our airspace.
Back in January, the White House released an executive order titled Iron Dome for America. Why do you feel like we need right now to deal with this issue of missile defense? Why does the U.S. need an Iron Dome and what sort of threat posture do you think we’re looking at and what would be the mission of this Iron Dome?
[VANHERCK] You really need to defend your homeland. It’s the thing that has made us prosperous, the most influential nation on the planet. It’s what we do every day, the greatest nation on the planet here. So you’ve got to defend it.
I wrote the first article in the Wall Street Journal and it was titled, “The Homeland Stands Unguarded” to educate folks that largely we’re unable to defend our homeland today. You can have a little bit of capability for ballistic missiles with 44 interceptors expanding to 64 with the next generation interceptor. But you can’t really defend against a large kind of attack.
So you need to defend the homeland to make sure that we stay prosperous, that we’re able to be that most powerful nation on the planet but most importantly so that the president has decision space, so that the secretary has decision space — Secretary of Defense. Once you get in a crisis you can’t look out there and go, ’gosh we can’t even defend our homeland.’ And the will of the people is going to be crushed at that point. I wrote the article in the Wall Street Journal for that reason, to educate the ignorant. I say that because I had a mentor tell me their ignorance is your fault for not educating them. To talk about, largely, we stand unguarded.
Hypersonics, the commander of NORAD Northcom is not even tasked to defend against hypersonics with the exception of a hypersonic cruise missile. And so many people believe that you’re out there defending. We’re not, we’re not tasked. And by the way, if you don’t have the domain awareness as you heard earlier, you can’t defend against them.
So my ability when I was the commander to defend against a hypersonic was near zero. But the most important thing I did as a NORAD commander was provide threat warning and attack assessment, and you do that mission so you can have continuity of government, survive your nuclear forces, all for strategic stability. I would tell you that strategic stability is eroding based on a limited ability to defend as this specifically the PRC develops capability to hold us at risk, and the risk of strategic deterrence failures growing.
Watch the video to see the full conversation.
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