When the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen launched multiple missiles on September 19 against Saudi Arabian targets, including the capital city of Riyadh, most of the incoming weapons were intercepted high in the atmosphere before doing any damage.
The few Houthi missiles that did hit targets caused significant localized damage but no reported deaths as yet. The deaths and damages would have been far greater had the Saudis not possessed U.S.-designed ground-to-air interceptors capable of knocking those incoming weapons out of the sky. And those interceptors were first made possible on March 23, 1983, when then-President Ronald Reagan told America he had made a decision that offered “a new hope for our children in the 21st century.”
Reagan called that new hope the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). His many critics in the national media, the academic world and congressional Democrats derisively dubbed Reagan’s vision “Star Wars,” claiming it would never be possible for America to hit an attacking bullet with an intercepting bullet.
Here’s how Reagan described his SDI vision:
“What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack; that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? I know this is a formidable task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of this century. Yet, current technology has attained a level of sophistication where it is reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades, of efforts on many fronts. There will be failure and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. As we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But is it not worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is!”
Reagan thus called “upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.”
Reagan’s critics weren’t buying it. Nobel laureate Hans Bethe and similarly skeptical colleagues with the Union of Concerned Scientists insisted that Reagan’s proposed SDI interceptors based on pin-point X-ray-laser weapons offered “no prospect of being a useful component” of erecting a ballistic missile shield. Their critiques were comprehensively presented in their 1984 book, “The Fallacy of Star Wars.”
They also argued that any such system would remain vulnerable to comparatively inexpensive Soviet countermeasures, as well as the fact the Soviets and Chinese had more than enough Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) armed with multiple nuclear warheads to overwhelm any conceivable SDI defensive system, including space-based lasers.
Reagan’s Democratic critiques were especially harsh, as seen in Senator Ted Kennedy’s accusation that the SDI proposal amounted to nothing more than “misleading Red Scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.” Senator Walter Mondale, the Minnesota Democrat who would later lose in a monumental landslide to Reagan in the 1984 presidential contest, called it “madness” because “the most dangerous aspect of this proposal is for the first time we would delegate to computers the decision as to whether to start a war.”
And, according to The Wall Street Journal, (future president) Senator Joe Biden ripped Reagan because “Star Wars represents a fundamental assault on the concepts, alliances and arms-control agreements that have buttressed American security for several decades. The president’s continued adherence to it constitutes one of the most reckless and irresponsible acts in the history of modern statecraft.”
Reagan was correct in expecting development of the SDI-concept of missiles and lasers capable of knocking out incoming weapons high in the atmosphere to require decades, and there were multiple setbacks along the way, most of them the product of partisan politics and competing technologies demanding federal support.
But if nothing else has been demonstrated since February 23, 2026, when President Donald Trump ordered the first U.S. air strikes conducted jointly with the Israeli Air Force, it’s that Reagan was also right on target in contending American technological ingenuity and creativity could hit a bullet with another bullet in the sky.
Since those first sorties, U.S. military forces have successfully intercepted more than 1,500 Iranian ballistic missiles, versus only about 5% that got through and landed on or near their intended targets. That figure does not include the more than 6,000 Iranian attack drones that were knocked down with conventional measures.
Reagan envisioned conventionally armed missiles as anti-missile interceptors and in the ultimate expression of the SDI proposal, a space-based system using lethal lasers to knock out enemy weapons shortly after their launches are detected. And just a few days ago, Air Force Secretary Troy Meink confirmed for the first time ever that the U.S. has launched and made operational “on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”
Meink did not specify how these space-based weapons deliver a lethal response to attacks by adversaries, but given related recent developments, it is not unreasonable to see the new systems to either include lasers now or in the very near future. There are a variety of advanced systems that could now be orbiting the earth as part of the new U.S. defenses, including kinetic “hit-to-kill,” radio frequency jammers that disrupt enemy satellite communications, laser dazzlers that temporarily blind optical sensors, and cyber electronic warfare approaches.
Consider that the Navy has recently deployed developmental prototype laser defenses aboard operational warships, including the HELIOS mounted on the USS Preble, and the LOCUST tested on the aircraft carrier George H.W. Bush. These have not yet been fielded operationally across the fleet, but that development is likely coming soon.
And the Navy has since 2019 deployed on multiple destroyers the ODIN system, which is a lower-powered laser Optical Dazzling Interdictor. Considering the ODIN’s main job is blinding or disrupting the optical sensors of drones, rather than burning through and destroying attacking aircraft, it could well also be deployed in space.
This reminder of the critical reaction to Reagan’s SDI proposal is also applicable to critics who in recent decades have asserted that beyond doubt humanity would be wiped out within a decade or so by the environmental crisis, the Y2K crisis, or most recently AI directed robots.
It was also Reagan who said of many of his critics — not just those opposed to SDI — that “they know so many things that just aren’t true.”