Army Revamps to Pursue New Air-and-Missile Defense Tech.

• Author: Mayfield, Mandy

As the Army works toward modernizing its air-and-missile defense capabilities, the service is expanding efforts to develop joint systems that will be key to winning future battles.

The technology is one of the top modernization priorities being spearheaded by Army Futures Command. As part of its effort to bolster its capability, the service is combining offices and testing technologies with the other armed services to converge and streamline the process of building and integrating new platforms.

Maj. Gen. Robert Rasch Jr., program executive officer for missiles and space at Redstone Arsenal, said his office underwent a shake-up to support the military's evolving multi-domain operations concept.

"Our PEO over this past year has gone through a complete realignment of our products and our project offices in order to posture us to support this notion of convergence," he said during the Association of the United States Army's Global Force Next conference in March.

These efforts began in late 2019 when officials examined the organization and considered areas where they were lacking.

"We have converged from eight separate project offices down to six, and we've converged commodities that support air-and-missile defense, like sensors, shooters and command-and-control, all into separate single project offices where we can reutilize the synergy of those teams," Rasch said.

The organization's previous construct did not allow the Army to quickly adapt or meet the pace necessary for new efforts. The new structure allows the office to break away from the antiquated systems of the past, he said.

"We stood up our integrated fires and rapid capabilities office to oversee this evolution of our capabilities," Rasch said. "The integrated fire's office was put together really to be the incoming point of our future requirements into the PEO." The new office will help break down capability requirements in order to properly address them.

"In many cases, from a convergence perspective, or an integrated fire's perspective, that could involve multiple project offices," he noted.

The integrated fires office now acts as a sort of umbrella for the other organizations.

The most recent effort to go through the newly realigned organization is the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor.

The radar system, also known as LTAMDS, is designed to defeat advanced and next-generation threats including hypersonic weapons.

By layering the new integrated fires office over the top of...