ELECTRONICALLY REPRINTED FROM JUNE 2015
Army Tests New Missile Defense
Brain, IBCS; Navy, MDA Intrigued
BY SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.
T
he Army’s missile defense force is getting a new
brain. That’s the real meaning of a successful
test yesterday of something called the Integrated Air & Missile Defense Battle Command System, or
IBCS for (mercifully) short.
IBCS doesn’t blow stuff up. A Patriot missile destroyed the target in last week’s test at White Sands
Missile Range. IBCS doesn’t detect the target: A Patriot
radar did that. (Even the target was a Patriot, simulat-
ing an inbound ballistic missile). So
what does IBCS do? It links the radar, the launcher, and the human decision makers — and in more flexible
ways than ever before.
“The ultimate long range goal is
to be able to engage any target with
any weapon with data that comes from any sensor,” said
Northrop Grumman vice president Dan Verwiel.
Last week’s test demonstrated that IBCS software,
network, and command post function as well as the
existing command system. The next IBCS test will attempt something the current systems cannot do, connecting a radar and a launcher that were never designed
to work together.
That first test will be a Patriot launcher and a Sentinel air defense radar, Verwiel told me. The ultimate
goal is to mix and match freely: not just among Army
missile defense systems, but between the four armed
services, and not just among existing systems, but with
easy plug-and-play for any future system, including exotica such as laser weapons. The program has already
gotten IBCS to talk to the Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) — albeit in a lab, not in a field
test — and it will eventually link up to the Missile Defense Agency’s command network for continental defense, C2BMC (Command & Control, Battle Management, & Communications). Of course, just getting all
the Army’s systems to work together will be challenge
enough to start with.
That flexibility is what makes IBCS — not new missiles, not new radars, not even lasers — the “Number
1 priority” of the Army’s air and missile defense force,
Space and Missile Defense Command’s Gen. David
Mann said at a February conference.
“Many folks can just dismiss it as a network,” said
Brig. Gen. Christopher Spillman, commander of the
Air Defense Artillery School, at the same Association
of the US Army conference. “It’s much more than that.”
Currently, each anti-aircraft weapon or missile defense system comes with its own launchers, its own
command-and-control, and its own radar. That’s
straightforward as long as you only deploy one thing.
But each system is best against a different kind of threat
— that’s why the military buys more than one thing in
the first place — so the best defense is a layered defense. When you try to use more than one system at
once, however, some human being has to look back and
forth between two screens (or three, or four, or however
many systems you’ve deployed) to try to figure out if
the threat that (say) the Patriot is seeing is the same in-
coming missile the THAAD radar has picked up. If the
human gets confused, you might take multiple shots at
one threat while letting another get through unhindered.
Or you might blow a friendly aircraft out of the sky, as
happened twice in 2003, killing two British air crew
and one American.
To prevent these tragedies, IBCS is designed to create “a single integrated air picture” fusing data from all
available sensors into a coherent and consistent whole.
All told, IBCS will replace seven separate commandand-control systems currently in service.
That means IBCS has to talk to all the software and
hardware those seven systems currently control, software and hardware that was designed at different types
to different standards by different companies. Most also
predate the current push for open architecture, which
means they rely on proprietary technology jealously
guarded by the original manufacturers. Just getting everything to work together without violating anyone’s
intellectual property was a major effort, Verwiel told
me.
The need to plug into all these existing systems also
led to a “tremendous number of requirements,” Verwiel
said. (Requirements is an acquisition term of art for
specific things the government says the product must
be able to do).
There were “literally many thousands of requirements,” he said, “which is an order of magnitude greater than anything we’d ever dealt with this customer before.” Those requirements also grew over time as the
military became more conscious and more stringent
about protecting its networks from cyber and electronic
warfare (i.e. hacking and jamming).
So Verwiel is understandably chuffed that his baby’s
first test went off without a hitch. Three more flight
tests will follow over the next 12 months — he declined to give details — and the official Limited User
Test will begin next spring. Then in comes the big
one, the Pentagon’s Milestone C decision in August
2016 about whether the program is ready to move from
development into production.
How’s that coming? “The IBCS program [was] iden-
tified by OSD as an exemplar program for should-cost
and Better Buying Power,” said Barry Pike, the Army’s
deputy program executive officer for missiles and
space, speaking at the February conference.
In particular, Pike said, IBCS should allow Army
missile defense to keep pace with the threat at a price
we can afford. Under the old model, if you needed to
replace an obsolescent radar (for example), you needed
to upgrade — or replace — the weapon and command
system that went with that radar as well. Under IBCS,
which allows components to plug and play, you just
need to replace the obsolescent piece, without having
to touch anything else– a major cost savings. That’s
the kind of modest, incremental modernization that the
cash-strapped and chastened Army sees as its best path
forward.
Copyright © 2015 by Penton Media, Inc.
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