Breaking Defense – WASHINGTON: The Army is effectively rebooting a key air and missile defense program, IFPC, to refocus it on higher-end threats like cruise missiles. This is just one of the sweeping changes in the service’s $190 billion budget request for 2020, as the service urgently pivots from fighting terrorists to focus on high-tech “strategic competitors,” Russia and China. The Army had planned to spend $517 million on IFPC through 2023, but that’s likely to change when the new numbers come out tomorrow.
The new approach will tone down some “gold-plated” requirements that asked the Indirect Fire Protection Capability to do too many missions at once, said Brig. Gen. Randall McIntire, director of the Army’s Cross Functional Team for air & missile defense modernization.
“We were trying to make it do two different mission sets, quite frankly,” McIntire told me. IFPC was originally meant to shoot down everything from drones swarms and rocket barrages — large numbers of relatively low-performance threats — to cruise missiles — which come in much smaller numbers but are much harder to catch. The competing demands for long range and lots of shots in a relatively mobile package just proved too much to reconcile.
