Over the past six months, the 1st MDTF deployed 16 cells across 10 time zones to support five named joint or bilateral exercises, said Brig. Gen. Bernard Harrington, 1st MDTF commander. The cells are task-organized and can be as small as a three-soldier team and as large as a company or battery.

The 1st MDTF saw its first major use during the naval exercise Rim of the Pacific in 2018. Since then, they’ve added capabilities, personnel and equipment to play a role in Orient Shield and Talisman Saber in 2019.

Early exercises put into practice what had previously been merely concepts, Harrington told an audience on Wednesday at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference.

What that work has accomplished already is a way for the Army to establish its own “interior lines,” or forward presence, near China to push back against their protective anti-access/area denial bubble.

But they’re not doing that by massing tanks on warships along the coasts. Instead, they’re using a variety of measures — radios, radar, cyber and old-fashioned missiles — to highlight the reach of the Army and its partner forces.

Harrington noted that China has its advantages on its own turf. It has all its forces available and a deep magazine to fire offensively or in defense.

“It’s very hard to close that gap with mass and magazine depth,” he said.

In the old days, Harrington added, a unit would work up to a partner exercise, conduct the exercise and go home and wait for the next exercise. But new practices make a persistent forward presence the norm.

That presence helps build those interior lines and extend them over time.

Newly appointed commander of the 3rd MDTF, formed in September, Col. David Zinn, made a clear distinction between the MDTFs now versus the early years of their inception.

“We are not an experimental formation, we are an operational formation,” Zinn said.

Experimentation will still continue, as it did in Forager 2021, also a Pacific military exercise. That exercise saw the first synchronization of all assets — land, air, maritime, cyber, space and electronic warfare.

Then, at RIMPAC 2022 the task force fused the four things it must do to be successful — sink ships, shoot down missiles, neutralize satellites and jam an enemy’s command and control.

The force set its sights on a vessel off the coast of Hawaii during a joint ship sinking event.

Soldiers coordinated near simultaneous effects, using space assets, to shut down satellites. They used live electronic warfare attacks to jam communications. A cyber team isolated the vessel’s connection to headquarters. And then a long-range strike was launched, Harrington said.

And while they conducted that attack, a Mississippi Army National Guard unit ran air defense for the task force.

The Army has slated 1st and 3rd MDTFs for more than 15 exercises in eight countries with plans to add more than 1,400 personnel from 39 Army branches over the next year, Harrington added.

Those exercises include Project Convergence-Pacific, Northern Edge, Orient Shield, Yudh Abhyas, Tiger Balm, Balikatan and Talisman Sabre.

Also, next year, 3rd MDTF is expected to reach initial operational capability and the Army expects to field both its mid-range, 1,000 kilometer strike capability and a long-range hypersonic weapon in the region, Harrington said.

The “major developmental test” of the Integrated Air-and-Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) — the brains of the Army’s future Integrated Air-and-Missile Defense (IAMD) system — showed it performed “exceedingly well,” Dan Verwiel, company vice president and general manager of missile defense and protective systems, said in an Oct. 9 statement.

IBCS has had successful flight tests in 2015 and 2016, which proved the system “could do what was previously thought to be undoable — that IBCS could provide the [command and control] for sensors and weapon systems never intended to work with each other,” he added.

However, a Limited User Test last year found deficiencies with the system mostly related to software.

But Verwiel declared in the statement the software deficiencies identified in the 2016 LUT, “have been resolved.”

He said lessons learned from the LUT “resulted in a substantially improved system.”

Bringing IBCS to life is no easy endeavor by nature. It involves complicated software development, and the plans for IBCS on the battlefield have expanded, resulting in the need for more development.

The soldier checkout event took place at Tobin Wells in Fort Bliss, Texas, with soldiers from both Fort Bliss and Fort Sill, Oklahoma, over the course of three weeks in August.

IBCS was used across battalion and battery-level operations using Sentinel and Patriot radars and Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-2, PAC-3 and PAC-3 Missile Segment Enhanced interceptors.

The system fought “26 simulated air battles against hundreds of tactical ballistic missile threats,” according to the company statement.

Then the event wrapped up with a 72-hour endurance run of IBCS that included 18 additional air battles, the statement adds.

“This SCOE is an enterprise-level integration and test of IBCS and Army IAMD assets and capabilities with soldier operators,” Barry Pike, the Army’s Missiles and Space program executive officer, said. “The event allows air defense warfighters the unprecedented opportunity to provide relevant system performance and interface feedback when the system is integrated with actual tactical hardware and software.”

While IBCS’ initial operational capability is delayed by four years, according to a Defense News assessment of budget request documents, there are signs the system is making a turnaround.

[US Army anti-missile command system’s initial capability delayed four years]

Brig. Gen. Randall McIntire, the Army Air Defense Artillery School commandant and the Air Defense Artillery chief, said, “I am very pleased with the significant progress made on IBCS over the last year. It is going to open up the aperture in terms of how we will be able to fight in the future. What we are working on today will be key for decades to come in our ability to combine offensive and defensive fires into one entity that is fast and agile.”

The event also proved that IBCS is relatively easy to use. The soldiers who used the system in the checkout had never used it before and received only four weeks of training leading up to the event.

“Even with simultaneous targets reaching hundreds during some of the air battles, the soldiers performed exceptionally well,” the statement reads.

IBCS and the Army will go through the second phase of the soldier checkout at Yuma Proving Proving Ground, Arizona, this month, which will focus on live-air operational performance in a joint environment, according to the statement.