Northrop Grum­man Cor­po­ra­tion announced that its Inte­grat­ed Bat­tle Com­mand Sys­tem, or IBCS, con­tin­ues strong per­for­mance against high­ly chal­leng­ing tar­gets dur­ing live-fire test.

NG released a state­ment on Thurs­day say­ing that the U.S. Army suc­cess­ful­ly inter­cept­ed a high-per­for­mance, high-speed tac­ti­cal bal­lis­tic mis­sile tar­get and a cruise mis­sile tar­get dur­ing a flight test using the IBCS.

The tar­get mis­siles were part of the sec­ond of two live-fire tests dur­ing the Army’s IBCS Lim­it­ed User Test (LUT) at White Sands Mis­sile Range, New Mex­i­co, and demon­strat­ed the system’s abil­i­ty to acquire, track, iden­ti­fy and engage diverse tar­gets from var­i­ous loca­tions, speeds and altitudes.

“These two back-to-back suc­cess­ful test events are a tes­ta­ment to the com­mit­ment and part­ner­ship between the great men and women of the Army’s oper­a­tional and acqui­si­tion com­mu­ni­ties and Northrop Grumman’s pro­gram team,” said Kenn Todor­ov, vice pres­i­dent and gen­er­al man­ag­er, com­bat sys­tems and mis­sion readi­ness, Northrop Grum­man. “We are com­mit­ted to the mis­sion of the U.S. Army and look for­ward to con­tin­u­ing that part­ner­ship in get­ting the game-chang­ing IBCS capa­bil­i­ty into pro­duc­tion and fielded.”

Like the first LUT flight test, the sec­ond test was con­duct­ed by sol­diers from the U.S. Army 3rd Bat­tal­ion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery (ADA) Reg­i­ment. Their defense con­sist­ed of two bat­tery and one bat­tal­ion IBCS engage­ment oper­a­tions cen­ters, two Patri­ot and two Sen­tinel radars, and four Launch­ers with a mix­ture of Patri­ot Advanced Capa­bil­i­ty Two (PAC‑2), Patri­ot Advanced Capa­bil­i­ty Three (PAC‑3), and Mis­sile Seg­ment Enhanced (MSE) inter­cep­tors con­nect­ed to the IBCS Inte­grat­ed Fire Con­trol Net­work (IFCN).

“First, I would like to rec­og­nize how excep­tion­al­ly proud I am of the sol­diers of the 3–43 ADA Bat­tal­ion. This formation’s laser focus and stead­fast ded­i­ca­tion, start­ing with New Equip­ment Train­ing last year through this Lim­it­ed User Test live fire, will ulti­mate­ly trans­form the Air and Mis­sile Defense fight for our joint for­ma­tions,” said Maj. Gen. Rob Rasch, Army Pro­gram Exec­u­tive Offi­cer, Mis­siles and Space. “It’s been amaz­ing to our sol­diers’ abil­i­ty to suc­cess­ful­ly track, engage, and destroy mul­ti­ple tar­gets in a high­ly-com­plex live fire oper­a­tional test, fur­ther demon­strat­ing the IAMD’s game-chang­ing tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage. As we con­tin­ue to fine-tune sys­tem per­for­mance in order to ful­ly demon­strate sys­tem require­ments in the Ini­tial Oper­a­tional Test & Eval­u­a­tion in Fis­cal Year 2022, we main­tain high con­fi­dence for suc­cess due to the great lead­ers and sol­diers of the 3–43, who will ulti­mate­ly become the first-ever IBCS-enabled battalion.”

The flight test com­menced with the tar­get mis­siles being launched from dif­fer­ent points of ori­gin toward the Army defend­ers at the con­trols of IBCS. The TBM tar­get was fired far from the mis­sile range and trav­eled on a bal­lis­tic tra­jec­to­ry, while the cruise mis­sile sur­ro­gate flew a low-alti­tude course. As the tar­get mis­siles trav­eled inde­pen­dent­ly towards their tar­gets, mul­ti­ple dis­parate radars pro­vid­ed data to IBCS. IBCS inte­grat­ed the data to form a sin­gle unin­ter­rupt­ed com­pos­ite track of each threat, impos­si­ble with any sin­gle sen­sor, which then informed engage­ment solu­tions with the best inter­cep­tors to engage both incom­ing threats. The sol­diers then exe­cut­ed the IBCS-enabled engage­ment, which includ­ed the launch of a PAC‑2 to inter­cept the cruise mis­sile and a PAC‑3 to inter­cept the advanced TBM. The suc­cess­ful exe­cu­tion of this sec­ond LUT flight test moves IBCS anoth­er step clos­er to Mile­stone C fol­lowed by pro­duc­tion and field­ing of IBCS.

IBCS is the cen­ter­piece of the U.S. Army’s mod­ern­iza­tion strat­e­gy for air and mis­sile defense to address the chang­ing bat­tle­field. IBCS enables rev­o­lu­tion­ary and bat­tle sur­viv­able “any-sen­sor, best-effec­tor” oper­a­tions by: fus­ing infor­ma­tion from mul­ti­ple, dis­parate sen­sors to cre­ate a sin­gle inte­grat­ed air pic­ture; and employ­ing all avail­able effec­tors to defeat advanc­ing threats.

“We need this weapon sys­tem in order to main­tain a tech­no­log­i­cal advan­tage in the future,” said Sec­re­tary of the Army Ryan McCarthy dur­ing a recent vis­it to Northrop Grumman’s Huntsville Man­u­fac­tur­ing Facil­i­ty to thank the IBCS team. “It’s not a ques­tion of whether or not we might get there; we have to get there.”

The post U.S. Army con­ducts suc­cess­ful tests of its new com­mand and con­trol sys­tem first appeared on Defence Blog.