Army photo

An IBCS Engagement Operations Center (EOC) set up at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, for the Limited User Test. (Northrop Grumman)

Story updated on 1/24/22 at 11:00 am ET to clarify the Army did not fire on the tracked targets for this exercise.

WASHINGTON: The US Army’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) remotely tracked and engaged targets at the Army’s Project Convergence last year, according to contractor Northrop Grumman, even using an F-35 as a spotter for artillery strikes.

IBCS, made by the defense company, is the Army’s future air and missile defense backbone, designed to connect disparate radars, combine their targeting data and pass that information to the correct launcher. The program has been under development since 2009 and the Army recently awarded the defense giant a $1.4 billion contract for low-rate and full-rate production.

At Project Convergence, the Army’s annual sensor-to-shooter event in the Yuma, Ariz. desert, IBCS participated in a “series of complex network and communications exercises,” including precision strike and an integrated air and missile defense mission, according to the company.

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In one case the IBCS platform fused data from an F-35 sensor to identify and track a ground target, and provided that “engageable track” data to the Army Field Artillery Tactical Data System (AFATDS), according to a Northrop Grumman spokesperson. That data-fusing capability is central to the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept, the future American way of war in which streams of data are passed across the disparate warfighting systems to inform battlefield decisions.

“Project Convergence provided us another opportunity to demonstrate our architecture’s ability to deliver joint connectivity across the services,” Christine Harbison, vice president and general manager, combat systems and mission readiness at Northrop Grumman, said in a release Wednesday. “That open architecture allows utilization of satellite communications to conduct remote engagements of target missiles, demonstrating our ability to connect the battlespace for all-domain operations.”

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Other Northrop Grumman products tested at Project Convergence include the Joint Tactical Ground Station and the Marine Corps AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar.

The Army also launched several surrogate tactical ballistic missile surrogates, which the Northrop Grumman platforms tracked through a mix of ground, airborne and space-based sensors that sent tracking data to an engagement operations center at Fort Bliss, Texas. Operators then fired on the incoming missiles.

Project Convergence 2021 included seven scenarios that simulated the phased of multidomain operations and tested joint interoperability. The event raised questions about how to do joint long-range fires and ensure the combined force has a common operational picture of the battlefield — an ongoing, technically complex challenge.

IBCS will be central to the JADC2-enabled battlefield. Under the contract awarded late last year, Northrop Grumman will produce 160 systems over the next five years.