Army wants a more powerful missile for its new medium-range air-defense system

The U.S. Army wants a more powerful interceptor for its new medium-range air-defense system, something that can take out Chinese cruise missiles without being too big, the service’s top missile buyer said Tuesday.

“I’m looking for magazine depth,” Brig. Gen. Frank Lozano, who leads the Program Executive Office for Missiles and Space, said at an event held by think tank CSIS and the Association of the United States Army.

Lozano said a competition is planned in fiscal 2025 for the new missile, which will be fired from the truck-mounted Indirect Fire Protection Capability System. Designed to take out everything from drones to cruise missiles, the IFPC launcher is intended to “bridge the gap” between short-range air defenses and the Patriot and THAAD systems. The Army is currently assessing IFPC Increment Two—along with the Sentinel radar that guides it and the Integrated Battle Command System that controls it—ahead of a go/no-go production decision.

The current version of the IFPC holds 18 AIM-9X Sidewinder short-range air defense missiles per launcher, and Lozano has said the second increment should hold just as many. But he wants a more powerful missile, something akin to the performance of the longer-range 335-pound AIM-120D AMRAAM. 

But the AMRAAM launcher holds just a half-dozen missiles and takes 45 minutes to reload.

“You're not going to be survivable in a Guam defensive situation,” said Lozano, who said he wants “AIM-120D-like capability in an AIM-9X package.” 

Lozano added that he’d been “signaling to industry” that the Army needed better propellants to help the IFPC Increment Two missile hit targets at longer ranges and move faster. He also said that the Army needed better engagement calculators to improve targeting of “faster moving supersonic cruise missile threats.” 

Lozano added that IFPC increment two testing was progressing well, with a planned test this fall that will include the Integrated Battle Command System, Patriot missiles, LTMADS radars, IFPC, and the Sentinel A4 radar. 

The Army is also looking to make sure its battle management systems allow it to make hard calls on what enemy missiles and drones to prioritize, said Lt. Gen. Robert Rasch, who leads the Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office. 

For example, an adversary could overwhelm an air-defense point with loitering munitions, then send in more capable hypersonic missiles, or vice versa, said Rasch. Russia uses decoy drones in order to identify enemy air defense systems, and Azerbaijan used drones to trick Armenian air defenses into revealing their position in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war. 

“You have to have a battle management fire control system capable of adjusting on the fly based on how threats are presented, and then real time teeing up decisions for [operators] to make,” he said.

A planned composite air-defense system composed of both Terminal High Altitude Area Defense missiles and Patriot missiles is also necessary due to the Army’s limited number of Patriot battalions, added Brig. Gen. Patrick Costello, who leads the Pacific-based 94th Army Air and Missile Defense Command. 

“There's never going to be enough air-defense soldiers,” Costello said, saying that the requests from the geographic commands that the United States uses to divide the world into zones of responsibility would individually “suck up all 15 Patriot battalions that we have.”