Army Working to Fill Air-and-Missile Defense Gaps.

• Author: Harper, Jon

After nearly two decades of fighting insurgents on the ground, the Army is turning its attention to threats from the air and beefing up its ability to fend off attacks.

The United States military has enjoyed air supremacy for many decades. Not a single American soldier has been killed by enemy aircraft since the Korean War, Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville noted recently.

"We've been pretty uncontested except on the land... but as we go into the future we're not sure that that's the way it's going to be," he said at the National Defense Industrial Association's Army Science and Technology Conference. "We believe we'll be contested [from] the air... and so we have to develop the force and modernize the force so it can win on that battlefield."

Brig. Gen. Randy McIntire, the head of the cross-functional team charged with spearheading the service's efforts to modernize its air-and-missile defense systems, said the Army will have to rebuild its capabilities after many years of neglect and underfunding.

"We lost a significant amount of our capability in the mid-2000s... primarily to pay for the war in the Middle East with force structure [cuts]," he said in an interview with National Defense. "There were decisions made that we would always have air supremacy and air superiority, so the Army made decisions in terms of where they wanted to invest."

Recent Russian military activity in places like Ukraine served as a wakeup call and highlighted the need to deploy new systems to protect U.S. ground forces from air and missile attacks, he said.

The near-term solution that the Army is pursuing is an interim mobile short-range air defense capability, or MSHORAD, to protect maneuver forces.

The Army is moving aggressively to acquire it, Secretary Mark Esper said during a meeting with reporters.

The service recently awarded a contract to an industry team to develop nine prototypes. A Leonardo DRS equipment package will include Moog's reconfigurable integrated weapons platform, Rada's multi-mission hemispheric radar and Raytheon's Stinger missiles--all of which General Dynamics will integrate onto its Stryker vehicles.

"It's traditional effectors--guns and missiles on a Stryker chassis," Esper explained. The MSHORAD-equipped Strykers will be able to keep up with heavy formations, he noted.

McIntire said the prototypes are expected to be delivered in spring 2019, and the first systems are slated to be fielded in 2020.

These new tools are intended to shoot down enemy unmanned aerial vehicles, planes and helicopters. When it comes to...