The Army has long operated numerous different types and bands of radars in its missile defense operations, but now those disparate capabilities are being tied together under a single program designed to provide a more complete common operational picture.
The Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS), an enterprise-focused platform designed to coordinate U.S. air missile defenses around the world, demonstrated its effectiveness earlier this year at White Sands Missile Range. Now the Army is working on implementing the program, expected to field in fiscal 2018, as part of larger efforts to integrate missile defense operations.
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“Right now the IBCS is program is focused on the Patriot and Sentinel [programs]. Those are threshold requirements,” Brig. Gen. Neil Thurgood, Army program executive officer for missiles and space, said Aug. 13 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama. “IBCS is the control – there is no separate control. It’s the first air defense system that we’re building as an integrated system, not as a standalone system.”
That system eventually will link low-frequency, mid-frequency and high-frequency radars that provide separate functions and views, Thurgood said.
“We need different frequencies and bands for our radars because they do different things and they see different things. And we need them to see different things,” he said. “If you take those same bands and the radars we have…you see it would benefit to hook them all together, and that’s why we have IBCS. Today we don’t see one single air picture…so these domains associated with these bands are tied together in the IBCS program.”
As Army leaders look to transition to next-generation missile defense, they are focused on emerging non-kinetic threats as well.
“This construct of cyber warfare and electronic warfare are really at the forefront. If you watch what’s happening in Ukraine, if you watch what China is doing and what they’re learning – and they’re not the only ones out there. There are a lot of them out there,” Thurgood said.
Part of boosting defenses against those threats includes the development of digital jamming capabilities that can target multiple bands simultaneously, Thurgood noted.
