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Imagine cruise missile threats streaming through the air toward multiple vulnerable targets. As that happens, radar nodes light up across a wide-spanning territory as an airborne F-35 senses the attack. The stealth fighter then hands off targeting data to ground-based U.S. Army Patriot interceptor missiles, knocking the approaching missiles straight out of the sky and destroying the attacking threat. [/COLOR][COLOR=rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.72)]
This kind of warfare development, wherein multiple sensor nodes track and share information across domains to identify and destroy threats, represents the exact intention of the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS).
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IBCS is a fast-emerging technical system engineered by Northrop Grumman to network radar and sensor nodes throughout wide ranging air, ground and sea operating environments as a new interwoven, or meshed, air defense network.
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“IBCS is in theory the ability to link multiple sensors to an air defense system. Right now, if a defense system is a Patriot missile, you have a Patriot radar. If it’s a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Air Defense), it has a TPY-2 THAAD radar. We’ve got several radars for different systems. IBCS brings the ability to take any sensor and link it to just about any air defense system to include some of our artillery sensors and counterfire sensors,” Gen. John Murray, Commanding General of Army Futures Command, told Warrior in an interview. [/COLOR]