Army: Proposals For Cruise Missile Killer Due June 4

WASHINGTON: The Army has completed a “shoot-off” between competing air & missile defense interceptors and is awaiting final proposals from the companies, generals said this afternoon.

Each competitor got up to three shots at live targets at White Sands Missile Range, said Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch, program executive officer for missiles & space. That followed “a year of learning” that began with high-fidelity computer simulations of how the competing interceptors would work with Army systems, then moved to hardware testing in Army labs and finally to the live fire shoot-off in late April and early May.

The crucial consideration for the Army: Not only must the interceptors be highly effective, they must work seamlessly with the service’s new missile defense command-and-control network, IBCS. (IBCS is expected to be a key part of the Army’s contribution to a future all-service Joint All Domain Command & Control meta-network as well). The shoot-off fed targeting data from a Sentinel radar through IBCS to the competing launchers.

The companies have digested the live-fire data and are preparing final, formal proposals. Those are due June 4. The Army aims to pick a single winner in August, Rasch said. That vendor will face the daunting task of delivering 16 combat-ready launchers and 80 interceptor missiles – what the Army refers to as “fieldable prototypes” – before the fall of 2023. That’s a test of the maturity both of the weapons system itself and the winning team’s ability to manufacture it quickly and affordably, Rasch said.

That initial version of IFPC will focus on countering cruise missiles and larger drones, which the Army has identified as the biggest “gap” in its current defenses when it came to a future conflict “with China [or] with Russia,” Rasch told reporters.

Later upgrades, circa 2026, will add the capability to counter lower-end threats, like the unguided rockets used en masse by Hamas in its recent conflict with Israel. Such “Rocket, Artillery and Mortar” (RAM) threats are considered a lesser danger, both because they’re less accurate and because the Army already has two systems designed to counter them: C-RAM, a modified Navy gatling gun used to defend forward bases, and Iron Dome, the Israeli system that intercepted 95 percent of targets in the Gaza conflict.

“We’re going to have to have a system that does more than RAM,” said Brig. Gen. Brian Gibson, director of Air & Missile Defense modernization for Army Futures Command.

Manufacturer Rafael says they’ve upgraded Iron Dome to deal with cruise missiles as well, and a modified Iron Dome’s Tamir interceptor, called SkyHunter, is the Raytheon-Rafael offering for IFPC. Other competitors haven’t been publicly disclosed, but our colleague Jen Judson reported one other: a Dynetics team using a ground-launched version of the AIM-9X Sidewinder air-to-air missile.

Meanwhile, the Army is also developing a 300-kilowatt high energy laser, IFPC-HEL, as a complement to kinetic interceptors.