Army Connects Air-Ground Missile Defense With Navy Warships at Sea

By Kris Osborn, President, Center for Military Modernization

Tracking ballistic missiles from warships in the sea, handing off targets from stealth fighters jets to ground interceptors and destroying multiple incoming cruise missiles with an extensive multi-domain network of sensors … are just a few things the Army’s fast-evolving Integrated Battle Command System is now configured to accomplish. The system is further expanding, due to a partnership between the Army and IBCS-maker Northrop Grumman, who have been working to leverage innovations and break the system through from air-ground connectivity to air-ground-sea interoperability.

The Army and Northrop Grumman are taking new steps to expand targeting, threat tracking and missile defense technology to more fully incorporate maritime warfare platforms into a joint, integrated, multi-domain system, a move seeking to help the service’s IBCS and the extended “BattleOne” command and control network efforts to breakthrough into a much greater multi-domain operational capacity.

IBCS, a now fully functional Army weapons and technology developmental effort, has been developing more many years as a multi-node, interwoven web of otherwides disparate sensor systems, radars and threat detection systems streamlined into an integrated, multi-domain warfare picture for commanders and decision makers. IBCS is capable of linking otherwise disaggregated or “stovepiped” defense sensors nodes and interceptors such as a Sentinel Radar, Patriot Missile and a software defined Active Electronically Scanned Array radar called AN/TPS-80 G/ATOR.

The idea is to massively widen the envelope for air and missile defense across a series of “networked” systems and platforms otherwise separated by distance and technical standards. With IBCS, a Sentinel radar can, for instance, detect an air threat from hundreds of miles away from a Patriot interceptor weapon yet still transmit time-sensitive threat data to the Patriot to enable target tracking and an “intercept” wherein the Patriot destroys the threat.

Shooting Down Two Cruise Missiles

Northrop Grumman has recently succeeded in integrating Naval platforms into the IBCS network system, connecting Aegis radar and warship threat-tracking technologies to air and ground nodes. The effort could be described as accelerated, as integrating Aegis into IBCS requires interoperable technical infrastructure, interfaces and “gateway” systems able to pool, analyze and transmit data from otherwise incompatible transport layers. For instance, perhaps one element of threat data arrives through an RF signal, another through satellite transmission while yet a third operates with some kind of datalink or wireless network. Years ago, the IBCS system was successful in connecting an F-35 to IBCS, adding an aerial sensor and targeting layer to the command and control missile defense network. Now, Northrop experts explain that Navy and Marine Corps “nodes” are also capable of integrating.

“The integration of additional sensors from multiple services continues to show the power inherent in the IBCS architecture and design to incorporate and integrate joint sensors across multiple domains,” Rebecca Torzone, vice president and general manager, combat systems and mission readiness, Northrop Grumman, said in a written statement. “By enabling joint operation and utilizing multiple sensors operating in various bands, IBCS was able to operate through the electronic attack environment so soldiers can identify, track and ultimately intercept the threat.”