Joe Biden, A Longtime Missile Defense Skeptic, Now Must Decide How To Protect The U.S. Homeland (From Forbes)

Joe Biden has seldom been a big supporter of homeland missile defenses during his long political career. However, as president he will have to make decisions about how to deal with the growing nuclear threat from North Korea, and the imminent emergence of long-range hypersonic weapons on the strategic landscape. Doing nothing is not an option. At the very least, the new administration will need to upgrade the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, the only operational defense the nation currently has against long-range ballistic threats. But there are other steps that need to be taken too: building a more capable successor to GMD interceptors, providing backup layers to the primary defensive system, and orbiting a satellite constellation for birth-to-death tracking of long-range threats. None of this looks especially expensive when compared with the cost of one nuclear warhead landing on an American city. I have written a commentary for Forbes here.