Northrop Grumman [NOC] and MBDA said on Monday they finished a new effort to incorporate the European Common Anti-air Modular Missile (CAMM) into the U.S. Army’s integrated air and missile defense (IAMD) Battle Command System (IBCS).
IBCS is the U.S. Army’s future missile defense network. While the standard system is integrating the Patriot missile defense interceptors and radars with Sentinel radar, the Army has started integrating the Air Force 3DLERR and is looking to incorporate the Marine Corps’ G/ATOR system as well.
The CAMM is MBDA’s air defense missile using a solid-state active RF seeker that comes in both land- and sea-based models. The U.K. is using the CAMM in its Sea Ceptor air defense for the upcoming Type 26 Global Combat Ship frigate. In late 2017 the British Royal Navy finished qualification firings of the Sea Ceptor using CAMM interceptors (Defense Daily, Dec. 20, 2017).
The companies underscored this was an internally-funded effort and the first non-U.S. missile system integrated into IBCS.
Northrop Grumman said the U.S. Defense Department and U.K. Ministry of Defence approved this effort to demonstrate integration “in an affordable and rapid manner.”
However, Northrop Grumman spokeswoman Sudi Bruni told Defense Daily Monday neither government played a role in the engineering development efforts to integrate the systems and they did not certify performance.
The work involved completing “functional integration of the end-to-end firing chain for integrated fire control and fire direction configurations between CAMM and IBCS,” Northrop Grumman said.
This work finished all of the research and development goals to integrate CAMM into IBCS “and reduces risk and costs for full integration,” the company added.
Bruni said the company expects if IBCS and CAMM are jointly acquired in an international air defense procurement program “additional testing will be pursued to validate overall system architecture performance.”
While integration is conducted with approval of associated government officials, the level of performance validation/certification “would be dependent on the specific requirements of a procurement program,” Bruni said.
Bruni said the companies conducted testing of the integrated solution at Northrop Grumman’s lab in Huntsville, Ala., in fall 2018
While Northrop Grumman did not disclose funding levels of the program, Bruni said “this integration activity was a fraction of time and cost of what is usually associated with disparate systems.”
The company highlighted this as an example of IBCS featuring open systems architecture.
“This is another demonstration of the ‘any-sensor, any-shooter’ IBCS design that integrates weapons in a short time and at a small fraction of traditional costs,” Bill Lamb, Northrop Grumman’s director for international battle management, said in a statement.
Michael Mew, MBDA’s ground-based air defence program head, likewise noted the integration “demonstrates how the CAMM family and its associated systems have been designed from the outset for integration into IAMD networks, including with third-party battle management command and control and sensors.”
The Army expects IBCS developmental testing to occur in 2019, have a Milestone C decision in 2020, and initially field the IBCS by 2022 (Defense Daily, Jan. 7).
MBDA is jointly owned by Airbus (37.5 percent), Britain’s BAE Systems (37.5 percent) and Italy’s Leonardo.