Breaking Defense

The Army’s new missile defense network just passed its second live-fire flight test in two weeks. Once again, IBCS coordinated the near-simultaneous shootdown of two target drones.

But “it is so much more than shooting at two missiles,” said Gen. Joseph Martin, the Army Vice-Chief of Staff, who visited White Sands Missile Range with Under Secretary James McPherson to observe Thursday morning’s test.

While last week both targets were the same type, MQM-178 Firejet drones, flying in close formation, this week there were two very different targets on radically different trajectories: an MQM, flying low and (relatively) slow like a cruise missile, and a Black Dagger/Boosted Zombie, flying high and fast like a ballistic missile. A single Patriot missile defense radar can’t watch both high and low at once – but the whole point of IBCS is to connect previously incompatible systems, in this case Patriot and Sentinel, and let any command post on the network get high-fidelity data from different kinds of radars in different locations.

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