The U.S. Army plans to combine the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system and the Patriot air-and-missile defense platform within two years to facilitate communications between the two equipment and support the development of the service’s Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, Defense News reported Monday.Brig. Gen. Randy McIntire, cross-functional team lead for the Army air and missile defense, told the publication in a Wednesday interview the CFT conducted an industry day with the Missile Defense Agency and other stakeholders to address the system integration issue.
“We were able to reprioritize, and some of the things that we were doing to integrate THAAD and Patriot were four and five years away, but we kind of magnified the problem and were able to reprioritize three significant capabilities that we thought would be game-changers with those and actually bring them in about two years to 18 months sooner,†McIntire said.
He noted that the service could potentially incorporate and deploy the integrated THAAD-Patriot systems as a future increment to IBCS.
