THAAD Battery Launcher. (Lockheed Martin)

CORRECTION 10/12/21 at 8:54 p.m. ET: The original version of this report incorrectly quoted Lt. Gen. Dan Karbler on the future of open architectures in missile defense. The story has been updated to correct the quote.

AUSA: While the military races towards its much-touted all domain future, a top Army official said today it needs to confront a big challenge right from the start: the increasingly sophisticated anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities of adversaries like Russia and China.

The Pentagon is working through connecting sensors to shooters through its concept of Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2), developed with an eye toward overcoming those A2/AD capabilities. Key to that effort is passing targeting data to enable long-range fires.

“Penetrating and disintegrating A2/AD is the fundamental problem of all-domain operations. It’s the hardest problem we’ve got,” said Brig. Gen. John Rafferty, director of the Long-Range Precision Fires Cross-Functional Team. “JADC2 should start there. It takes a mix of offensive and defensive fires that … encompass hypersonic [missiles], supersonic [missiles], subsonic [missiles], different platforms, different launch trajectories — all that to overwhelm our adversary. And we think that that’s where we should start with JADC2 and build from there.”

“So I think that we will contribute to the requirement for JADC2 going forward,” he said at the annual Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, DC.

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Another top official, Army Space and Missile Defense Command leader Lt. Gen. Daniel L. Karbler, said that the service had learned many lessons from the service’s in-development Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) that it wants to apply going forward. The Army’s IBCS is just about to start its initial operational test and evaluation, and it wants to connect to the rest of the joint force as part of a critical capability has part of JADC2.

But in order for future systems to become part of JADC2, they need to be interoperable. The key moving forward, Karbler said, will be sharing — not developing stovepiped systems and not using proprietary systems.

“We’ve seen firsthand how hard it is just to break down some of the software coding into some of our specific air missile defense systems to make sure that we realize IBCS capabilities,” he said. “Well, now expanded out to see JADC2 now you have multiple platforms, not just the future ones that we’re looking at which hopefully will all be built with an open architecture in mind, but the legacy platforms that now we’re going to have to go back as a department and start to figure out what do we have to peel apart, we have to take apart [from] those proprietary lanes, so that we can truly recognize the vision of [combined] JADC2.”

The service is integrating IBCS with the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System as part of the ongoing Project Convergence 21 experiment in the desert outside Yuma, Ariz.

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“We don’t have all the interceptor [capabilities] to meet them [adversaries] and one for one missile v[ersus] missile competition,” Karbler said. “We absolutely have to be integrated with our offensive fires.”

Meanwhile, Pentagon leadership is in the midst of a Missile Defense Review that will assess the US missile defense posture and provide guidance for future investment. At the AUSA event, Karbler said that the MDR needs to “recognize the importance of what offense brings.”