This situation is partly the result of DoD’s longstanding emphasis on fielding costly, long-range surface-to-air interceptors to defeat a small salvo of anti-ship cruise missiles or a hand-ful of ballistic missiles launched by rogue states such as Iran and North Korea. It is also because the U.S. military has never fought an enemy who had the capability to strike distant targets with precision. Since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon had the luxury of assuming that air and missile attacks on its bases and forces would either not occur or would be within the capacity of the limited defenses it has fielded.

These assumptions are no longer valid, given that America’s adversaries have taken advantage of proliferating guidance and missile

technologies to create their own precision strike capabilities. China, Russia, Iran, and North  Korea have developed multiple variants of guided missiles and other weapons that are capable of striking targets with increasing range and precision. Salvos of guided weapons launched during future  agagements could overwhelm the defenses of U.S. forces, reducing America’s ability to project power