Through its 100th Missile Defense Brigade, the Army already manages command-and-control missions for the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system that is designed to defend the homeland from ICBMs from North Korea and Iran. The GMD system is made up of 44 interceptors buried in the ground at Fort Greeley, Alaska, and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The 100th Missile Defense Brigade is made up of largely National Guardsmen but also includes active-duty soldiers.

As the Defense Department continues to work on the architecture and elements of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome homeland missile defense shield, the Army has been developing capabilities to counter cruise missiles and a wide variety of drones, including systems that can defeat entire swarms.

The service is also leading the acquisition of systems that will become a part of the air and missile defense architecture for Guam that’s currently taking shape. Those capabilities include the Patriot air-and-missile defense system, a new missile defense radar and the Indirect Fire Protection Capability system that can defend against cruise missiles, drones, rockets, artillery and mortars.

The Army, which currently serves as the space component for the GMD system under U.S. Northern Command, will expand into the role of service component command for all air-and-missile defense, Gainey told Defense News in an interview at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

“That aperture has been opened,” Gainey said. “No longer are we just focused on the GBIs [Ground-Based Interceptors] in Alaska defending the homeland from an ICBM attack. We’re now going to be in a role for [US NORTHCOM commander] Gen. [Gregory] Guillot for all of air and missile defense, and it’s appropriate that it’s going to reside with Space and Missile Defense Command.”

The change will also realign CONUS-based Army Air and Missile Defense Commands, or AAMDCs, under SMDC, giving them a higher headquarters with deep expertise in homeland defense operations.

Gainey said the shift will allow the commands to “synergize” their efforts, optimizing mission sets between the two AAMDCs and improving coordination.

Gainey, who also commands the Joint Functional Component Command for Integrated Air and Missile Defense, or JFCC IAMD, said his team is preparing to support the homeland defense mission more directly. JFCC IAMD’s current responsibilities include assessing new missile capabilities, developing multinational missile defense effectiveness and executing joint and combined training.

Soon, Gainey said, it will “transform to assist SMDC in the homeland defense initiative.”

The broader role will be outlined in the upcoming Army Space and Missile Defense strategy, which Gainey said should be released within the next three months. The strategy reflects changes in the threat environment, including the rise of drone warfare, the need for artificial intelligence to manage operator workloads and the growing complexity of regional and “trans-regional” threats that can reach the U.S. homeland.

One key focus will be “missile defeat” — measures that go beyond traditional interceptor-based defense.

“The masses [of threats] introduce a whole new element into the calculus,” Gainey said. “We can no longer look at it the same of interceptor on interceptor.”

While details of the expanded mission are still taking shape, Gainey said the changes will position the Army to take a more holistic approach to homeland defense.

“We’re pretty excited about those opportunities of going from GMD to more holistic air and missile defense,” he said.

The company is taking its S3 variant and beefing it up into a new S4 variant to take on air defense missions, particularly countering drone threats, that could fit within the framework of President Donald Trump’s homeland missile defense shield dubbed Golden Dome.

The turbojet-powered, 3D-printed Hellhound S3 drone can carry a variety of payloads, and the company is putting that version forward as a loitering munition option for a competition that the U.S. Army is planning to kick off this year.

The S4 variant, designed to take on Golden Dome mission sets, is a scaled-up version of the S3 that adopts its modular architecture such as the removable nose that allows the unmanned aerial system to shift from countering drones to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance or serving as a weapon itself like a low-cost cruise missile, according to Sheila Cummings, the company’s CEO.

The S4 is “really a multimission capability as well as a multilaunch platform capability,” she added, “so ground-based is kind of the primary, but then the airframe and launch canister can support both an air- and sea-based launch.”

“Mobility and multimission capability are obviously paramount to any sort of layered approach for Golden Dome,” she said.

While the S3 variant is roughly 12 to 14 pounds, depending on the payload, the S4 falls in the 45-pound range. But the majority of the capability uses the same software, additive manufacturing techniques, 3D-printed materials and other commercial-off-the-shelf parts.

The S4 is in the engineering development phase and the company is building prototypes. The plan is to go into flight tests with the capability from as early as this fall through next spring, Cummings said.

Like the S3 manufacturing strategy, the S4 design also takes into account the reality that it will need to be manufactured at a large scale.

The military is changing the way it acquires weapon systems and, in many cases, requires companies to prove they can build systems at scale as part of competitive acquisitions. Historically, a weapon system might be chosen for its performance on the battlefield without much attention paid to the amount of work it would take to build a system or even how stable the supplier base was.

The Huntsville-based company chose a space next door to Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, home to the program office and testing and development for Army aviation, in 2021 and designed and built a facility intended to produce large numbers of the drones.

A large portion of the Hellhound air vehicle is made using commercially available 3D printers in-house and buying commercially available standard parts that are not unique to just a few suppliers, Cummings said.

“If you think about low-cost solutions — that’s part of the strategy — is we have to design something that we can get screws from multiple vendors, we can get 3D print material from multiple vendors,” she said. “We talk about exquisite payloads, that’s a different challenge, but electronics, we have to make sure we can source them from multiple vendors.”

For the Huntsville facility, Cummings said her goal is to produce at least 100 S3 air vehicles a month.

“The same distributed manufacturing approach that we have considered for the Hellhound S3 through our supplier partners is the same approach that we’re looking to take with S4 again,” Cummings said, such as, “the combination of U.S. and international partners [and] licensing agreements for the vehicle design, whether it be with the government or with industry partners, in order to meet the production demand.”

The company is “well suited to bring forward the solution set for Golden Dome as part of that layered defensive strategy,” she said. “Cummings Aerospace was built on missile defense programs. That’s how we first got started, and so we have, over the last 16 years, contributed to almost every interceptor, sensor or [command-and-control] program within the missile defense portfolio.”

Over the course of the last five-plus years, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office, or RCCTO, has built a wide variety of directed energy prototypes, from 10-kilowatt palletized systems for fixed sites to 20- to 30-kilowatt lasers mounted on small tactical vehicles, to 50-kilowatt systems on the Army’s Maneuver-Short-Range Air Defense Stryker-based vehicles.

The office also continues to develop a 300-kilowatt laser, as well as high-power microwave capabilities, to counter a variety of threats like drones, artillery and cruise missiles.

Out of the 17 prototypes developed through the office, the Army has deployed 11 of them, including four Directed Energy M-SHORAD systems to the U.S. Central Command area of operations.

Through operational experimentation, the Army has concluded there is great potential for directed-energy weapons, particularly because of their extraordinarily low cost per shot and naturally high magazine depth.

But currently, the ability to sustain the systems in the rough and dirty environments of the battlefield needs work — and industry is not yet poised to manufacture them at scale.

The Army decided to pursue what it is calling its Enduring High Energy Laser program to tackle those specific challenges and steer the capability from prototypes to systems that can be fielded.

“We have to continue to work harder, we have to continue to work with the soldiers. We have to continue to work with industry to develop our directed-energy platforms and focus on the areas of reliability,” Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, the RCCTO director, said Wednesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.

“We’ve got to work on maintainability because … we can’t get by with the thought of having clean rooms out in combat,” he said.

After years of prototyping, the Army’s Enduring High Energy Laser effort will also be designed to be delivered at scale “at more than onesies or twosies,” Rasch said.

The Army plans to release initial capability documents to industry within the next 60 days and is also planning to update its broad agency announcement, which was first released in the summer of 2024.

The service is looking at a modular approach for components and is asking industry to design the system with line-replaceable units, meaning components that can be swapped in and out by soldiers in the field in a non-sterile environment.

The experimentation in operational scenarios has led to a deep understanding of what components and parts of the laser systems have high failure rates, Col. Adam Miller, who is in charge of directed-energy programs within RCCTO, said at the symposium.

“The optics on these systems are one of the high failure rate items and one of the challenges that we have,” he said. “So as we look to design the beam director … we wanted to insert a touch point opportunity, an integration and a learning event for those soldiers to actually repair that optic and to demonstrate that.”

The system should also be interoperable in the sense that laser providers will not be asked to be vehicle integrators, like many were tasked to do in prototyping.

“We have decoupled the vehicle from our lasers,” Miller said.

“So, if the Army wants to put it on a robot or a Stryker or a [Joint Light Tactical Vehicle],” it can be done with some modifications and size, weight and power adjustments, he said.

The service is also looking to ensure the user interface is common and open, Miller added. The program will also challenge industry to design the systems to be ready to be manufactured at scale.

“Both industry, and on the government side, fully expect directed energy to go up like a hockey stick from the demand perspective, as well as the need to build these systems rapidly,” John Garrity, vice president at BlueHalo, now an AeroVironment company, said at the symposium.

“Not a single component of material suppliers is probably situated to meet that demand today, so our focus has been on building that coalition and team … to make sure that we are ready to actually produce those systems at scale and at volume.”

NGI is currently facing a year-and-a-half schedule slip, but a likely funding boost from President Trump’s homeland missile defense shield called Golden Dome could help reverse the slip.

By cutting a competition short to build NGI a year early and selecting Lockheed and its partner, L3Harris’ Aerojet Rocketdyne, to proceed, the Missile Defense Agency accepted some risk in the program intended to provide a more capable interceptor for the Ground-based Homeland Defense System that is poised to counter possible ICBM threats from North Korea and Iran aimed at the U.S

The decision was made to downselect to a single vendor in April 2024 due to funding decisions and priorities, according to MDA director Lt. Gen. Heath Collins at the time.

“One of the things we are committed to and really doubling down on is more rigorous testing, making sure we have the technical rigor and quality and that seamless integration into the larger weapon system that is going to allow us to bring more capability to the warfighter,” Reeves said during a media briefing at a Lockheed facility in Huntsville, Alabama.

“We are definitely looking at that as sort of a dual path situation, where we want to make sure that we have that schedule certainty and also that rigor that helps deliver the interceptor that America deserves,” she said.

Collins identified NGI’s number one program risk going forward — which would have been the case no matter which vendor MDA had picked — is the time it will take to develop a solid rocket motor for the interceptor.

“This is a new booster, a new development and we have experienced delays and issues with that development and are expecting 18 months or more delay in the delivery of that initial capability,” Collins said earlier this year.

MDA has “taken actions to shore up that development as well as bring in an additional source to help buy down the schedule risk of the development as we move forward,” Collins added.

The agency said the previous schedule supported an initial operational capability for NGI no later than the fourth quarter of fiscal 2028.

The Golden Dome architecture has yet to be made public and government officials here at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium underway in Huntsville have been ordered not to discuss President Trump’s ambitious project for the time being in public forums.

But Trump has previously stated that he expects to spend around $175 billion on the Golden Dome during his presidency and has projected that it will be completed before the end of his term in 2028.

The current GMD system has 40 silos with interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, and another four at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California. Earlier this year, Boeing finished building 20 more silos at Fort Greely, an expansion that began during the previous Trump administration.

It has been suggested that the Golden Dome include plans for additional silos at Fort Greely on top of the 60 existing there and another plan to install interceptors on the East Coast of the U.S.

The East Coast interceptor site concept has been pushed by lawmakers in the region for over a decade but gained little traction over that period due to other funding priorities.

MDA leadership contended that the GMD system as arranged offered sufficient protection from the threats it was designed to counter.

Reeves noted that while the program is focused on working through its critical design review, it is also busy building a missile assembly building in Cortland, Alabama.

“That construction is underway and will finish in early 2026,” she said.

“We’re really proud of the partnerships we’ve formed on this program since 2021,” she added. “We’ve been working with small businesses, medium-sized businesses and other primes to ensure that we’re bringing the capability that we need to this mission. This is foundational. It’s a Golden Dome for America.”

One year ago, at the same conference in Huntsville, Alabama, Gainey announced that a strategy was in the works to address a variety of new and emerging complex threats and would roll that document out in October 2025.

“We are taking stock of lessons learned from the field, the increased options that artificial intelligence and advanced technology present and we are getting back to the basics, remembering mass has a quantity of its own,” Gainey said.

The war in Ukraine and fighting in the Middle East have painted stark pictures of the challenges the Army will face when it comes to air and missile defense going forward.

The Army is planning to grow its air and missile defense capability by 30% over the next eight years, according to Gainey.

The last time the service released an air and missile defense strategy was in 2018, which was focused on the 2028 time period. That strategy centered on structure and force organization.

Now, the new strategy must address rising battlefield challenges observed in real conflict and take into account the development of President Donald Trump’s Golden Dome, a missile defense shield for the homeland.

The strategy, Gainey said, takes into account fundamental changes in how the Army will fight in combat, such as combining lethal and nonlethal capabilities, the integration of offensive and defensive fires, human-machine integration and the incorporation of artificial intelligence.

The advent of the Integrated Battle Command System, or IBCS, which is designed to connect any sensor to any shooter on the battlefield, will be “in every formation,” tying together disaggregated capability across the terrain for defense, and “create pockets of areas of defensive priority where it is needed the most,” Gainey said.

Additionally, the new strategy focuses on “prioritizing smart missile defeat,” Gainey said, which is the ability to get after the missile threat before it even leaves the ground.

Leveraging missile defeat “introduces a whole new element into the calculus,” he said, because it addresses the mass challenge faced in modern warfare as threats come in larger and larger salvos.

“We can no longer look at it the same … interceptor on interceptor,” he noted. “Missile defeat is one of the big areas inside of that strategy that we’re really pushing across the department.”

One of the key technology focus areas is incorporating artificial intelligence to address operator overload.

Officials have said AI will be an important aspect of homeland missile defense, particularly for Golden Dome, because defending large swaths of territory will require more than what manpower and systems alone can handle.

The Army sees growing involvement in homeland missile defense beyond managing the current Ground-based Midcourse Defense system.

“Space and Missile Defense Command already provides a defense to the homeland, and as we move forward, we see this command taking a larger role in the defense of the homeland,” Gainey said.

In addition to adding three Patriot battalions equipped with the Lower-Tier Air-and-Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS, radar, the service will also add five Indirect Fire Protection Capability battalions and seven Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems batteries, Lt. Gen. Sean Gainey said Tuesday at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

This force structure increase will take place over the next eight years, he added.

The plans align with the Army’s recent push to increase air-and-missile defense capability across the board, as lessons learned in Ukraine and in the Middle East continue to reinforce the necessity of the capability. The service also acknowledges a need to develop a more layered defensive structure that can address wide-ranging threats, including swarms.

The Army’s Patriot force has one of the highest operational tempos in the service, and a push to find a way to alleviate the pressure on those units has been ongoing for years.

The service believes one way to resolve that strain — in addition to simply growing the Patriot force structure — is to develop and field systems that can counter some of the proliferating threats on the battlefield, like drone swarms, cruise missiles or rockets, artillery and mortars with other capabilities like IFPC and counter-UAS systems.

Fielding five IFPC battalions aligns with the Army’s plan to develop five Multidomain Task Force, or MDTF, units, that will be dedicated to specific combatant commands and be equipped with Long-Range Fires Battalions that will have Mid-Range Capability and Long-Range Hypersonic batteries, as well as IFPC battalions.

The Army previously indicated it wanted to complete that force structure by fiscal 2028.

The Army has also sent IFPC prototypes to South Korea to help the Army work on concepts to create a composite air-and-missile defense battalion.

The service is additionally planning to build a composite battalion that will include Patriot with LTAMDS and the Integrated Battle Command System, and IFPC to serve within the architecture of the Defense of Guam system currently under development.

As part of its sweeping Transformation Initiative announced in May, the Army also said it wanted to dramatically increase C-UAS capability throughout the service. It has requested flexible funding to buy counter-drone systems in its fiscal 2026 budget request.

Within 36 days of the original idea, the company established the capability at its Center for Innovation facility in Suffolk, Virginia, also known as “the Lighthouse,” Thad Beckert, the company’s director of strategy and business development for its rotary and mission systems division, told reporters.

“Prototyping is already underway at the Lighthouse,” a company statement reads, “where real capabilities are being tested against current and future threat scenarios, from ground to space.”

When President Trump first announced his plans to develop the Golden Dome for homeland missile defense, Lockheed began thinking about what would be needed for such a capability when it comes to command-and-control.

“When you think about the combatant commander or the commander at all levels of operating within the operating theater, they all have to have an integrated awareness and that integrated awareness comes from making sure that when you see a threat, you know what that threat is and the best way to to engage that threat,” Beckert said.

“You want to have more than one shot at that threat. You also want to know that you’re putting the right weapon on the right threat, and you’re matching it against what you think might be coming. When you take all that together, that is a challenging problem, and when you scale it to the national level and beyond, that is one of the biggest challenges that’s ever been undertaken in the command and control world,” he said.

Adding, “This has not been done yet.”

Lockheed has a deep level of command-and-control experience including developing and fielding the Command and Control, Battle Management and Communications (C2BMC) system, which is the C2 for the U.S.’ global missile defense architecture.

Yet, the company does not plan to develop solutions in a vacuum and acknowledges the need to work across U.S. industry with other defense primes as well as companies considered non-traditional in the defense world.

“If you think about the capabilities that we’ve been talking about here for command-and-control. It’s beyond what Lockheed Martin makes,” Beckert said.

“It’ll include other capabilities that others that are currently fielded out in the environment… that will be part of this layer defense,” he continued. “So we have to take in all of those solutions and think about the best way to do both command-and-control — two separate actions — and make sure that we create that optimized defense.”

The prototyping hub “will be open to industry,” Beckert noted, and will be designed so companies can come together and work at higher classification levels and bring capabilities together in one place.

The prototypes will be based on existing capabilities, which is necessary to move at the speed required to meet the Administration’s goals.

Yet while existing capabilities will be leveraged, Beckert noted that “these weren’t designed originally to operate as a single, unified command-and-control capability. We have to bring them together and have them start exchanging data, not just any data, mission-thread-informed data, so that we can look at the mission and we can make sure that… the new way is faster, and that is success.”

With some machines already installed across the periphery of the vast, but still empty floorspace, the Advanced Manufacturing Facility – South (AMF-South) is poised to surge production of inert parts for solid rocket motors in a facility the size of six football fields (roughly 379,000 square feet). These parts include components like cases, nozzles, exit cones and aft closures.

Within 24 months of L3Harris acquiring Aerojet Rocketdyne, it invested over $20 million to bring the facility to life and additional funding from a Defense Production Act agreement helped pay for additional equipment and tooling.

The agreement between the company and the U.S. government is to increase rocket propulsion manufacturing capacity in the continental U.S. to keep pace with the rising global demand for tactical and strategic missile production.

The new facility has already begun to build parts for the Standard Missile, Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System and the Javelin antitank weapon and plans to expand to other programs requiring solid rocket motors in the future, Scott Alexander, L3Harris’ missile solutions president, said at the event. The plan is to continue to add capability to the floorspace as demand increases.

While the company has already hired 40 manufacturing employees, there is a plan to bring on another hundred in the coming years.

The new facility comes in addition to the company’s 136,00 square foot Advanced Manufacturing Facility in Northern, Huntsville, dubbed AMF-North. Opened in 2019, it covers the production of inert parts for larger solid rocket motors.

In addition to L3Harris’ Huntsville expansion, it is also rapidly building out large manufacturing facilities in Camden, Arkansas, and Orange County, Virginia., to cover the entire gamut of solid rocket motor production.

While AMF-North and AMF-South focus on inert parts, the company broke ground on a new production facility to make energetics for rocket motors in Camden, Arkansas, earlier this year, and construction is underway to build out production for small and medium motors — key components for the Javelin.

Across the board, L3Harris is redesigning how it produces solid rocket motors, driving into that design more flexibility and the ability to surge and produce at scale. The company is also working to introduce new methods to achieve a drastically higher production rate.

“We spend a lot of time talking about the mobilization of the [defense] industrial base. This is exactly what we need,” Maj. Gen. Frank Lozano, the Army’s program executive officer for missiles and space, said at the event.

“When you hear senior leaders across the nation talking about increasing capacity, increasing throughput, increasing missile and munition inventory levels; when you hear people talking about getting on a war footing, understanding the threats and the adversaries that we face on a daily basis; when we talk about all of these things, this is the manifestation of that outcome,” he said.

In 2023 the service announced a plan to add a 16th battalion, but it will now bolster a force stretched thin with two additional battalions.

Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Mingus announced earlier this month that the Patriot force would grow by “up to four” battalions.

Additionally, the Army is planning to build an Integrated Air and Missile Defense battalion for Guam. The Guam Defense System battalion is a composite battalion that will include the Integrated Fire Protection Capability, or IFPC, and the Integrated Battle Command System-enabled Patriot with the Lower-Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS.

IFPC is designed to provide defense against rockets, artillery, mortars, cruise missiles and drone threats at fixed and semi-fixed sites. The IBCS system is the newly fielded command-and-control system meant to tie shooters and sensors together on the battlefield.

The Raytheon-developed LTAMDS radar, now in low-rate production, is designed to replace the Patriot radar, offering a 360-degree range of protection against various types of missiles.

“The battalion is purpose built for the defense of Guam and not counted in the total number of 18 Patriot battalions,” the Army spokesperson said.

The Raytheon-built Patriot is in ever increasing demand globally. Ukraine has depended on the system for several years as it continues to beat back the Russian invasion which began in February 2022. The U.S. and other countries continue to make commitments to supply additional Patriot systems to the war-torn country.

The Patriot system also defended Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar against Iranian missiles in June.

All new Patriot systems that come off the line for the U.S. Army will be equipped with the LTAMDS radar and IBCS.

“It greatly expands the range, the altitude, and it’s a 360,” Mingus said recently at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “So you could take those same 15 Patriot battalions we have today, give it IBCS and LTAMDs, and fundamentally when you operationally employ it, it’s immediately doubling that capability.

“You would have the equivalent of about 30 Patriot battalions because instead of having to deploy as batteries, you can break them up and disperse them in a much more tactical way.”

The Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, or LTAMDS, arrived in Guam earlier this month with Army Secretary Dan Driscoll visiting Task Force Talon, the unit that will manage the LTAMDS radars on the island, over the weekend.

Defense News broke the news earlier this year that the Army would be sending the Raytheon-developed LTAMDS prototype radars to the strategic island as part of a larger effort initiated by the Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George. The Army hopes to test the advanced technology in real-life formations even before the development phase has formally concluded.

“Our soldiers on Guam are at the tip of the spear for homeland defense and deserve the very best,” Army Secretary Dan Driscoll told Defense News in a statement.

“We deployed the brand new [LTAMDS] radar to exercise in an operational environment. This radar will significantly improve the range and lethality of our weapon systems,” he said. “We’re thrilled to test it in the [Indo-Pacific Command] region and continue making improvements as it comes online.”

The Army is already beginning to integrate the sensors for testing and experimentation in order to continue to refine its capabilities in a real-world environment rather than within the confines of a testing range in the U.S.

The Pentagon is in the midst of developing a robust air-and-missile defense architecture to defend Guam from evolving threats.

LTAMDS is slated to be a part of a comprehensive air-and-missile defense shield, which is currently under development on the island.

As the hostilities posed by China continues to grow, the Defense Department had pledged to deliver a foundational capability to help stave off a potential attack directed at Guam by the end of 2024. That schedule has slipped.

Guam is an island of nearly 170,000 people that sits in a vulnerable position — it is closer to Beijing than it is to Hawaii. The island plays host to a significant amount of U.S. combat power and would therefore be an attractive target for China in the event of a war in the Taiwan Strait.

LTAMDS joins the Army’s major missile defense asset there, the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System, or THAAD, which has been deployed to Guam since 2013.

The service developed LTAMDS to replace the current radar in Patriot air-and-missile defense systems, improving its detection and discrimination capability and giving it the ability to see threats from 360 degrees.

In addition to the two prototypes on Guam, the Army also plans to send another LTAMDS radar to Guam in 2027.

The Army approved LTAMDS for low-rate initial production in April. The service has been working to replace its aging Patriot system for over 15 years, initially running a competition for a full system before canceling those plans in favor of developing a new command-and-control system and radar separately.

The service awarded Raytheon a contract in 2019 to deliver prototypes over five years. Building the radar rapidly was an ambitious challenge and the Army decided to keep the sensor in testing for an extra year to ensure it was fully mature and ready for prime time.

LTAMDS went through eight major missile flight tests along with roughly 10,000 hours of other testing, including radiate time, radar tracking time and testing against wind, rain, dust and road marches. The system is expected to reach full-rate production in 2028.

This fall, LTAMDS will participate in operational testing on Guam as part of the Army’s Transformation in Contact initiative that puts new capability directly into the hands of soldiers that will operate it prior to formal fielding in order to further to refine the system and inform how it will be used in realistic operations.