IRIA News

U.S. defense firm Northrop Grumman’s Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) completed two United States Army flight tests, demonstrated the IBCS’s resilience to enable all-domain command and control capabilities.

During the first flight test, the United States Army intercepted a “high-performance, high-speed tactical ballistic missile (TBM) target” by using Northrop Grumman’s Integrated Battle Command System, aided by the company’s Joint Tactical Ground Station (JTAGS). The JTAGS successfully detected the inbound TBM and delivered space-based sensor data to the system for early warning.

The Northrop Grumman statement read that the “IBCS established a track from the JTAGS data before ground-based sensors were able to detect the target, thus providing increased situational awareness for the operators.”

During the second flight test, the U.S. Army used the IBCS, which demonstrated the resilience of the system to counter two cruise missile targets in a stressful electronic attack environment. “IBCS was able to maintain continuous track custody of the targets by fusing data from multiple sensors degraded by electronic attack,” the company’s press release read.

According to the Northrop Grumman release, “The testing took place at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, utilizing operationally realistic scenarios with soldiers of the U.S. Army 3rd Battalion, 43rd Air Defense Artillery (ADA) Regiment at the controls of the system.”

Vice President and General Manager of combat systems and mission readiness at Northrop Grumman, Christine Harbison said “We continue to demonstrate our architecture’s power to leverage information from every domain, delivering unprecedented situational awareness and increased time and options to warfighters. IBCS’s maturity and ability to connect legacy systems significantly helps to expand their mission capability.”

“These tests are part of the Initial Operational Test and Evaluation (IOT&E) of IBCS, in which the system is evaluated on its operational performance prior to deployment and full-rate production,” the release added.

Northrop’s IBCS has an open, modular, scalable, and resilient architecture that is essential to integrating all available U.S. forces assets in the battlespace. Its architecture allows the effective integration of existing and future systems. The company’s statement highlighted that “numerous successful tests and demonstrations” of IBCS have validated the system’s ability to “connect and fuse multi-service sensor data to multi-service weapons” demonstrating Joint All-Domain Command and Control capabilities.

On January 3, 2022, Northrop Grumman Corporation announced that the U.S. Army awarded the defense firm a contract of more than $1 billion for the IBCS production.

According to the corporate vice president and president at the Northrop Grumman Defense Systems Mary Petryszyn, “IBCS is a centerpiece of the U.S. Army’s modernization strategy for air and missile defense to address the changing battlefield,” and the company is working closely with the U.S. Army “to leveraging the IBCS architecture” and create “an all-domain command and control capability.”

Earlier in July 2021, the U.S. Army also conducted a flight test of the Northrop Grumman Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System and engaged a cruise missile target in a highly contested electronic attack environment.

According to the Northrop Gruman release, during the flight test the U.S. Army conducted “live testing and demonstration of a Joint Track Manager Capability which provided a bridge between IBCS and the Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability, enabling the sharing of G/ATOR [Ground/Air Task-Oriented Radar] track data on the IBCS Integrated Fire Control Network. With support from Lockheed Martin, the flight test architecture also incorporated two F-35 combat aircraft integrated on the IFCN with on board sensors contributing to the IBCS developed joint composite track used to perform the engagement.”