Commentary The United States is sending Patriot missiles to Ukraine. This is great news. Anti-missile (i.e., “anti-ballistic”) missiles are one of the greatest defensive military inventions of the 20th Century. When I think of the Patriot missiles, I think about how they helped protect Israel during the first Gulf War. While they weren’t as effective as hoped, they demonstrated that the technology was possible and the effectiveness could be improved. Eventually, the technology was improved by the Israelis to implement Iron Dome, the system that has protected Israeli towns and its citizens from thousands of rocket attacks for more than a decade. When I think of Patriot missiles, and Iron Dome, I also think of President Ronald Reagan, who proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) on this day, March 23, 1983, as a comprehensive ground-based and space-based system to protect the United States from attack from nuclear missiles by destroying them …