Developed in partnership with Northrop Grumman, the Integrated Battle Command System, or IBCS, is the beating heart of the U.S. Army’s future air and missile defense architecture.
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This system networks with current and future sensors and weapons platforms – regardless of source, service, or domain – to create an integrated fire control network that identifies and engages air and missile threats. Its modular, open and scalable architecture allows users a sensor-fused, highly accurate, rapidly actionable ‘picture’ of the full battlespace.
IBCS tackles evolving air and missile threats, from incoming drone swarms to hypersonic weapons, while creating a ‘any sensor, best shooter’ strategy. This enables operators to select the optimal effector for the situation.
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The challenge lies in detecting and optimally engaging these diverse threats with all available defense systems.
Over the years, the U.S. Army has made significant investments in systems like Patriot, which is a medium-range air defense system, and THAAD, which is a system for intercepting short, medium, and intermediate-range ballistic missiles. These systems were traditionally designed to be tightly coupled between the command-and-control [C2], the sensors, and the effectors, making interoperability with other systems very difficult.
IBCS’s big idea is a network-enabled, Modular Open System Approach [MOSA]-designed command-and-control architecture, which essentially componentizes systems like Patriot. Meaning you remove the command and control – and then adapt the sensor [the Patriot radar] and adapt the launcher effector onto an integrated fire-control network.
The IBCS architecture integrates various sensors and effectors into a unified network. It is capable of collecting data from across the domains of ground, air, maritime, and space, to create a single integrated air picture that identifies all inbound threats.
An IBCS Engagement Operations Center is unloaded from a C-5 Galaxy transport aircraft. U.S. Army
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There are essentially three major equipment items in IBCS. There’s the Engagement Operations Center [EOC], which you can think of as a shelter that mounts on the back of a five-ton truck and it’s got an antenna mast and has the communications onboard. The EOC is where the soldiers plan and fight the battle. This remotes into something that we call the Integrative Collaborative Environment [ICE], which is essentially a standard Army AirBeam tent. The ICE is where soldiers plan and fight the air battle. IBCS provides for remoting up to 10 operator workstations into the ICE. Within the EOC, you have two operator workstations which affords the capability for operators to employ and fight the system while the ICE is being established.
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Today, with a standard U.S. Army Patriot, if you lose the Engagement Control Station at the battery level, then that battery is out of action. So culturally, this is a big change. Patriot was designed in the 1970s and was fielded in the 1980s, so employment thinking is still dominated by experience with Patriot. IBCS genuinely changes the paradigm for deploying whole battalions through its network architecture design that enables tailoring to enable employment of air and missile defense task forces. This means that rather than deploying a complete Patriot battalion, a commander could deploy a task force encompassing multiple types of sensors and effectors tailored for a specific mission. This provides commanders with a high degree of operational flexibility.
It’s also worth underlining the power of this open systems architecture. Traditionally, to perform a PAC-3 missile engagement, the uplink to the missile has to be performed through the radar. That’s very limiting because it means you have to deploy launchers in a position where they’re in proximity to the radar to be able to affect that uplink. This means you’re effectively constraining the range of the missile and the battlespace for performing engagements.
The Army has developed a capability called Remote Interceptor Guidance 360, or RIG-360, which is essentially an antenna uplink device that can be positioned at various locations on the battlefield. It removed the need to physically tether launchers and effectors to the location of the radar, so it’s an additional decoupling and dependency from a sensor.
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IBCS is designed to communicate with other platforms and command-and control systems across a number of data links to include Link 16 datalink and MADL [Multifunction Advanced Data Link]. In flight testing, IBCS has demonstrated the capability to integrate with F-35. In addition, one of the engineering initiatives the Army has pursued with the Missile Defense Agency, and which we have supported, is a bridging technology known as the Joint Track Management Capability, or JTMC bridge.
The U.S. Navy has a very similar kind of system like IBCS called Cooperative Engagement Capability [CEC]. CEC takes data from multiple platforms, such as SPY-6 radar on AEGIS-class ships, E-2D Hawkeye, U.S. Marine Corps’ G/ATOR radar [AN/TPS-80 Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar], and and integrates the data to create a high-fidelity quality track that is distributed across the network. The bridge enables the passing of data back and forth between the two networks to create a single integrated air picture.
TWZ: How does IBCS physically connect to the distributed systems at long ranges, and how might it plug into JADC2 in the future?
Lamb: IBCS is capable of being connected over long distances via fiber optics and satellite communications. We’ve demonstrated its ability to link with airborne platforms and sensors across various domains, with data displayed in command centers thousands of miles away.
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over the last year or so we’ve been integrating the Army’s Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor, known as LTAMDS. The Army also has plans to integrate the latest Sentinel A4 radar, and it announced plans to integrate THAAD [Terminal High-Altitude Air Defense]. There’s also a budget for deeper integration of the F-35 fighter as well as with passive sensors.
TL;DR – this system takes all sensors into a central network and allows the what is detected to be fed to any weapons system, develop a firing solution and then engage. This means that if a hugely expensive patriot detects a tiny drone, you don’t need to engage the drone with that but can easily hand off the target to a cheaper weapons system and engage with that instead.
Robin Edgar
Organisational Structures | Technology and Science | Military, IT and Lifestyle consultancy | Social, Broadcast & Cross Media | Flying aircraft
