The service in recent months has been doing market research to inform its pursuit of a “multi-domain artillery cannon” (MDAC) and hypervelocity projectiles (HVP), including via requests for information that were released in July.

“Based on market research conducted in July-October 2024 … the U.S. Army RCCTO believes BAE Systems Land & Armaments L.P. is the only responsible source capable of developing and delivering both the MDAC and HVP prototypes within the required schedule; competition of this effort is not practicable and will not meet mission fielding requirements,” service officials wrote in a notice of intent to sole source that was published Dec. 20 on Sam.gov, using an acronym to refer to the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.

The RCCTO therefore plans to issue a sole-source request for prototype proposal to the contractor as it looks to award an other transaction agreement, according to the notice.

The Pentagon’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO), which falls under the Office of the Secretary of the Defense, awarded the firm a $16 million contract a few years ago to mature and demonstrate the lethality of its hypervelocity projectile against ground targets at “extremely long ranges,” according to a company news release.

The contractor has also worked on HVP technology for the Navy.

“The HVP is a next-generation, common, low drag, guided projectile capable of executing multiple missions for a number of gun systems, such as the Navy 5-Inch; Navy, Marine Corps, and Army 155-mm systems; and future electromagnetic (EM) railguns,” according to a BAE product description. “The HVP’s low drag aerodynamic design enables high-velocity, maneuverability, and decreased time-to-target.”

When fired from 155-millimeter tube artillery, the projectile has a range of 43 nautical miles, or about 80 kilometers, and a maximum rate of fire of six rounds per minute, according to a company data sheet.

The MDAC effort, which is focused on air-and-missile defense capabilities, is a new-start project for fiscal 2025.

The technology is intended to defend U.S. military forces at fixed and semi-fixed locations against attack by “a broad spectrum” of drones, fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, cruise missiles, subsonic and supersonic cruise missiles, and “other advanced threats,” according to officials.

In future conflicts, the Army and other U.S. military services — collectively known as the joint force — are expected to be at risk from drone swarms and missile barrages, and they’re looking for new tools to cost-effectively counter them.

“Current air and missile defense munitions require onboard guidance and targeting components that drive high munition procurement costs. In contrast, the MDAC seeks to significantly reduce munition costs and enhance expeditionary utility by developing a 155 mm artillery cannon-based air defense system capable of firing Hypervelocity projectiles (HVP)s, integrated into a wheeled platform. The HVP will communicate with off-board sensors that track both the HVP and the threat and complete the interception of the target. The MDAC will interface with an external GFP Command and Control Battle Manager (C2BM) and the Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS),” Army officials wrote in an RFI released in July.

The term “hypervelocity” refers to speeds of Mach 5 — about 3,836 miles per hour — or higher.

According to a Congressional Research Service report, a gun-launched HVP had an estimated unit procurement cost of about $85,000 in 2018. In comparison, some U.S. military interceptors for air-and-missile defense cost millions of dollars.

The RCCTO has a requirement to develop and deliver a “full” MDAC weapon system battery by the fourth quarter of fiscal 2027 and carry out an operational demonstration in fiscal 2028.

That delivery is expected to include eight multi-domain artillery cannons, four multi-function precision radars (MFPR), two multi-domain battle managers (MDBM), and at least 144 hypervelocity projectiles, according to an RFI.

The HVP must be capable of supporting a launcher environment with peak pressures and setback greater than current surface-to-surface artillery; interface with government-provided off-board sensors that track both the HVP and threat to complete the interception of a target; interface with an inductive data transmission device to receive pre-launch mission data; enable rapid first-round response time and high rate of fire; maintain projectile maneuverability through interception of target; minimize the minimum required time of flight to intercept targets; maximize the lethal effects against threat systems; enable a rapid ammunition resupply time via manual and automated means; and demonstrate supportability, safety, and cybersecurity characteristics in the projectile design, among other requirements, officials noted in an RFI.

The Army plans to spend about $646 million total on the MDAC system project in fiscal 2025-2027 leading up to the demo, according to budget documents.

“The MDACS program will utilize streamlined acquisition methods to rapidly prototype the capability. It will leverage existing prototypes from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) to refine requirements and address Army and Joint Force concepts. Throughout the developmental effort, Soldier touchpoints will gather feedback for Army requirements generation and prototype maturation. MDACS will use the Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) and conduct a series of flight tests culminating in a battery-level operational assessment … in FY 2028,” per the budget documents.

Once the demo is concluded, the prototype weapon system is intended to be delivered to a “unit of action” supporting “multi-domain operations” as a “residual combat capability.” The prototype will also inform an “enduring capability requirement,” a program-of-record decision and future acquisition activities, officials wrote.

A BAE Systems media relations official did not respond to a request for comment.

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Soon after, Defense Department officials and observers pointed to the Juniper Oak exercise series hosted jointly by the Israeli Defense Forces and U.S. Central Command as a key enabler behind Israel’s defense and resilience against Iran’s latest attack.

“Juniper Oak — and for those that aren’t tracking, it’s a combined joint all-domain exercise that really works to improve our ability to work with Israel on land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace — and so, it was notable that the exercise series included U.S. and Israeli command and control and air interdiction, both of which were critical on defending Israel Saturday night,” Pentagon Press Secretary Maj. Gen. Pat Ryder said at a press briefing on April 15. 

In particular, he spotlighted an iteration of Juniper Oak that unfolded in Jan. 2023, which included roughly 6,400 U.S. troops, more than 1,100 IDF personnel, six ships, 180,000 pounds of live munitions and a live fire exercise, with more than 140 aircraft. 

Among other aims, that exercise integrated U.S. and Israeli fifth-generation fighter assets.

“It’s this kind of strategic cooperation and combined training that allows us to do what we did together on Saturday night,” Ryder told reporters after the mid-April strikes. 

Iran launched its direct assault on Israeli territory in response to a suspected Israeli strike on its embassy compound in Syria that killed top Revolutionary Guards commanders April 1. It came on the heels of intensifying clashes between Israel and Iran’s regional allies, which were largely triggered by the war in Gaza.

According to Pentagon reports, among the weapons launched from locations in Iran, Syria and Yemen, there were more than 110 medium-range ballistic missiles, more than 30 land-attack cruise missiles, and more than 150 uncrewed aerial vehicles. 

In the aftermath, it became increasingly apparent that the U.S., U.K., France, and Jordan (not the IDF) together shot down the majority of the Iranian drones and missiles fired in the assault.

“We know Juniper Oak was a bilateral exercise — but what we saw over the course of the weekend also included European partners and Jordan. So in fact, it was more sophisticated than the exercise itself in terms of the complexity of forces in the fight, and the level of deconfliction, communication and interoperability required to be successful,” Jonathan Lord, senior fellow and director of the Middle East Security program at the Center for a New American Security, told DefenseScoop in a recent interview. 

“So in that sense, it’s really that Juniper Oak was certainly a harbinger, [but] this was certainly even more impressive,” Lord said. “This was a lethal attack — and uninterrupted, it would have been disastrous.” 

Before joining CNAS, Lord served as a professional staff member for the House Armed Services Committee, for which he handled the U.S. Central Command/Middle East defense policy portfolio and provided further expertise on issues related to security assistance. He also served previously as a political military analyst in the Department of Defense and the Iraq country director in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy.

In early 2023, Lord wrote an analysis on Juniper Oak and its overarching significance — arguing that the exercises’ size, scope, and complexity “set it apart from any that came before.”

Bilateral cyber incident response, agile combat deployment, and aerial refueling marked just some of the focus areas prioritized in the series.

“Obviously, there’s a moment of crisis right now, which is probably limiting this. But the U.S. enjoys a long security relationship with Israel and other partners and is very frequently engaging in military exercises with those partners to build those capabilities. Juniper Oak was one example of probably the largest and most complex one, but it’s certainly demonstrated that the U.S. and Israel have the capability to do this in a sophisticated way. They practiced it, and then it actually effectively achieved it in a moment of great consequence [over the weekend on April 13 and 14], which we witnessed,” Lord told DefenseScoop.

The U.S. and Israel did not publicly name a specific adversary in the exercise series last year.

“I think that’s largely for political sensitivities in the region,” Lord noted.

Still, he said the activities were meant to inform the types of operations the military partners would need to master to manage local threats, and establish command and control capabilities to enable multiple services to work together in a combined, multi-domain manner.

“So, we saw operations in the Mediterranean Sea that were combining air and naval assets. We saw land operations that were combining air and ground assets. In fact — and this is where it gets a little hinky and you won’t probably get many people to speak in much detail — but in fact, we also, in that exercise, had components there in the cyber and space domains as well. So it gets really, really sophisticated,” Lord said. 

“And you can do that with partners who themselves have worked to build sophisticated, complex professional militaries, either independently or with us. In the case of Israel and Jordan, it’s really both,” he added.

Spokespersons from the Pentagon and U.S. Central Command did not respond to DefenseScoop’s requests for comment regarding Juniper Oak, or any planned future exercises like it.

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“We’re finally getting to a point where we can take advantage of multi-mission data that has always been available to us. We’ve always been able to see the data, but we’ve never been able to do anything with it,” Col. Pat Costello, director of the Army Futures Command air and missile defense cross-functional team, said during a panel discussion at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium on Tuesday.

Effectively leveraging data for multi-domain operations has been one of the Army’s top priorities as it looks to deter more modern and technologically advanced adversaries. During events like Project Convergence — the Army’s experiment to test interoperability for the Pentagon’s Joint All-Domain Command and Control (JADC2) concept — service leaders have noted difficulties in standardizing and understanding data so that it can be accurately disseminated across the Army and Joint Force.

Rather than not being able to see data from other mission sensors, Costello described the current integration problem for the AMD CFT as an inability to leverage data in a meaningful way. 

“How do the systems interact with each other? How do we take advantage of data that’s always been available to rotary systems on the offensive fires side of the house, but are useful when it comes to either counter-UAS or cruise missile defense — you name it — and vice versa,” he said. “For me, integration is really about that exchange of data and what we’re doing about it and how the systems that we have at our disposal interact.”

Col. Rory Crooks, director of the Army Futures Command long-range precision fires cross-functional team, said during the panel that he’s developed specific requirements to address integration challenges that help close “joint kill webs” — that is, the multi-layered and multi-directional structure of attack that leverages assets across the services. 

A key goal is enabling data sharing between today’s bespoke sensors that were designed for siloed and specific platforms or missions, he said.

“Really being able to share this data today under network-centric constraints means that we have to focus on standards — formatting standards, message formatting standards, standard data transport pipes and so forth,” Crooks said.

Those standards will be important until the service can pivot to more data-centric ways of sharing data between sensors, he added. It’s an important step to eventually getting to a unified data fabric and embracing microservices that will allow the Army to consume data and pass it off at machine-like speed, he said.

But data is only useful if it’s relevant to a commander or operator who is using it, Crooks noted. That need is driving his requirement for a common command-and-control operational picture.

“Data is only a commodity if it helps to drive engagement decisions, and those decisions are by commanders with authority and usually with a responsible approach to risk that allows them to make those decisions,” he said. “We have to get that relevant data — not all data — but only that which is relevant to really solve the problems that a commander at an echelon will frame so that he can close that kill loop or kill chain.”

Integrating sensors is a near-term challenge Crooks’ team is getting at. The Army is currently conducting experimentation on edge-to-cloud capabilities that allows them to duplicate a data fabric in small ways, he noted.

“We’ve developed deliberate microservices that allow us to go in and reach in whatever data format it was in, you can grab the data out and at machine speeds pass it to whoever needs it in the kill chain to complete that kill chain,” he explained. “That, to me, is what you start in the near term until you get the capabilities delivered to really approach this from a more holistic, data-centric way.”

As the Army works to improve how its sensors disseminate relevant data across the service, they can widen who is able to access key information within the service — all the way down to the division, Crooks noted. Through this decentralization, capabilities become more readily available to decision-makers at different unit levels, he said.

“To solve those problems down at the lowest echelon by giving them the best relevant data to help them solve their problems — if you localize it down to the level where it’s personal, where blood is being shed, that’s how we can scale up this fight with both offensive and defensive fires,” Crooks said.

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The Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS) program has completed initial operational test and evaluation (IOT&E), prime contractor Northrop Grumman announced Tuesday.

Officials say IBCS will not only be a central component of the Army’s future integrated air-and-missile defense capability but also a critical enabler of JADC2 by networking sensors and shooters across the services.

The 10-month IOT&E effort kicked off in January.

“So far, things are going really well there,” Doug Bush, assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, said Oct. 10 at AUSA’s annual symposium in Washington while the testing and evaluation were ongoing. “That’s exciting because that program and that effort — if we can actually connect sensors to shooters the way we envision — will enable all sorts of things in the future … [and] some of the things being worked on at Project convergence, for example, about how to connect intel sensors and shooters rapidly and win that long-range fires fight.”

IOT&E included a series of operational flight tests at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.

“Throughout the 10-month period, soldiers operated IBCS in complex test environments encompassing a broad spectrum of attack and defense scenarios under realistic operating conditions, stressing the system as never before, and under intense scrutiny by U.S. Army independent evaluators,” Northrop Grumman said in a press release on Tuesday.

The operational testing and evaluation included detecting, tracking and intercepting a “high performance” tactical ballistic missile and two cruise missile surrogates while the IBCS came under a “stressing” electronic attack, according to the company.

Additionally, the technology has been put through its paces at the Army’s annual Project Convergence exercise to demonstrate its utility for defensive and offensive missions.

One experiment confirmed the system’s ability to communicate with a missile in-flight by integrating with a new interceptor uplink.

In another experiment, IBCS was integrated with a variety of capabilities from multiple services including the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force.

“The Army successfully demonstrated the capability for IBCS to provide data for offensive fires for the first time in support of long-range precision fires objectives. IBCS rapidly integrated a U.S. Marine Corps sensor, Marine Expeditionary Littoral Persistent Sensor (MELPS), allowing information to disseminate to the U.S. Navy’s Cooperative Engagement Capability (CEC) fire control network. Additionally, there was an airspace command and control (AC2) interface with the U.S. Air Force to provide increased situational awareness,” per the Northrop Grumman release.

The company has “connected multi-service capabilities to enhance all-domain detection, tracking and engagement in the battlespace,” it said. “With each successful experiment and rapid integration Northrop Grumman proved Joint All Domain Command and Control (JADC2) can be a reality, allowing the U.S. Joint Forces and Allies to act as one resilient force.”

Bill Lamb, program director at Northrop Grumman, told DefenseScoop that at PC 22 the company’s technology demonstrated its ability to serve as a “bridge” between multiple systems across multiple locations including California’s Camp Pendleton and March Air Force Base, and Joint Base Lewis-McCord in Washington state.

The exercise “allowed us to demonstrate a truly joint service air picture and pass the track data over the network,” he said in an email.

The system was designed to have a modular, open, and scalable system architecture that can integrate current and future capabilities “regardless of source, service, or domain,” according to Northrop Grumman.

In December 2021, the contractor landed a $1.38 billion contract for both low-rate initial production (LRIP) and full-rate production of IBCS, with a five-year performance period.

The company is expected to deliver up to 160 systems to the Army and foreign partners, including Poland.

The technology is currently in LRIP. For Poland’s WISLA program, Northrop Grumman is on track to meet an initial operational capability by next year, Lamb said.

The completion of IOT&E is the last major test hurdle before the U.S. Army makes its decision about whether to transition into full-rate production (FRP).

Lamb told DefenseScoop that Northrop Grumman is “fully positioned” to move directly into FRP.

In a release last year after the contract was awarded, Program Executive Office Missiles and Space said the contract will enable the program to “seamlessly ramp up production to meet Army fielding priorities” after a FRP decision is made.

Lamb said Northrop Grumman expects that the Defense Acquisition Board will make its decision in “early 2023.”

The IOT&E exercises, which included “realistic operational scenarios” and flight testing in “challenging scenarios,” were run by the Army independently, he noted.

“We don’t have access to all of the data they are reviewing. However, based on the results that we have been able to observe, we would identify IBCS as being successful. We are very confident in the ability of IBCS to serve as the centerpiece of the Army’s Air and Missile Defense program,” Lamb told DefenseScoop.

Meanwhile, the Army has been touting the technology’s potential.

“IBCS is a keystone Army Futures Command program that will provide a decisive battlefield advantage through weapon and sensor integration and a common mission-command system across all domains, delivering an integrated fires capability to the warfighter while improving battle space awareness, decision timing and protection against threats in complex integrated attack scenarios,” PEO for Missiles and Space said in a release.

The program has been underway for some time. The engineering and manufacturing development contract was awarded back in 2009, but the project was delayed several years as the desired capabilities for IBCS expanded beyond the initial vision and the program confronted software development challenges, according to Defense News.

At the AUSA conference, Bush acknowledged that it’s been “a long program,” but added that things are “coming together” and IBCS will be one of his focus areas in fiscal 2023.

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