In past elections, the Republican Party has carried the banner of missile defense — systems for intercepting nuclear warheads before they can strike their targets. It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who spent $200 billion on the Strategic Defense Initiative, also known as “Star Wars.” Bill Clinton, on the other hand, slashed funding for the program and put off deploying a planned national missile defense system.

But, somewhat like the states of Nebraska and North Carolina, the true believers of missile defense now seem to be tilting toward the Democratic Party. At least that was the vibe last Friday at the Adventure Aquarium in Camden, New Jersey, where the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance bunkered down at its annual awards lunch. Officially, MDAA is nonpartisan and nonprofit, seeking only to spread the good word about missile defense. Most of the luncheon’s non-MDAA guests came from the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin, or Lockheed Martin subcontractors.

Riki Ellison, the former NFL linebacker who founded the MDAA, praised Hillary Clinton’s knowledge of missile defense, diplomatic work with NATO, and help with putting Lockheed Martin’s Aegis systems into Eastern Europe and its THAAD system into Guam. An Aegis anti-missile installation is now online in Romania; another Aegis system, in Poland, is scheduled to go online in 2018. “I think Don[ald] Trump is naive on the issue still,” Ellison told me. “He needs to be educated, if he comes in … we don’t know what Donald Trump, how, you know, on any issue.”

Deployment of a national missile defense system was prohibited for many years under the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. George W. Bush formally pulled out of the treaty in 2001.

Today’s systems are modest in comparison to the missile defense shield Reagan had imagined. They are designed to shoot down a few ballistic missiles before they can hit their targets. President Obama proposed a four-phase plan for European missile defense shortly after taking office, a scaled-back version of the Bush administration’s proposal. In a September speech, Trump tried to position himself as a champion of missile defense. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has issued multiple statements about building up missile defense in Israel, the Persian Gulf, and around the Pacific Rim. Clinton reportedly said she would “ring China with missile defense” in a 2013 speech.

“We’re the military,” Chris Johnson, a spokesperson for the Missile Defense Agency, said, when asked about the election. “Our job is to support whoever is elected.”

There’s a lot on the line for missile defense proponents: The president’s 2017 budget calls for $7.5 billion, a significant amount but also a reduction compared to prior years. On Friday, Vice Adm. James D. Syring, who leads the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency, mentioned nuclear tests by North Korea, research by Iran, and “the continued pursuit of more capacity by nations who do not like us.” Against these threats, Syring said that he looked forward to more sales of missile defense systems to foreign governments, and a new $784 million Alaska radar now being developed by Lockheed Martin, which he called “the lynchpin for homeland defense and missile defense system for the next 40 years.”

