Dynetics unveils Enduring Shield, its solution for the US Army's future cruise missile defense capability

Jen Judson
·4 min read

WASHINGTON — Leidos-owned Dynetics has been tight lipped about its solution it has offered to the U.S. Army and demonstrated in a live-fire event for the service’s enduring Indirect Fires Protection Capability designed to defend against a variety of airborne threats.

While it’s been well-known that one team consisted of Rafael and Raytheon, offering up the Iron Dome launcher and Tamir interceptor, Dynetics would not previously publicly admit its participation in the competition.

The Army is using Iron Dome as an interim cruise missile defense capability as it works to bring an enduring solution into being.

The Army is on a path to choose an enduring system that will counter both drone and cruise missile threats by releasing a solicitation to industry for a prototyping effort and by hosting a shoot-off for two teams at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. Eventually, it will add capability to counter rockets, artillery and mortar threats as well.

The teams that participated in the shoot-off brought a combination of a launcher and an interceptor. The demonstrations happened over several weeks beginning at the end of April and ending in early May.

Defense News first reported that, according to several sources familiar with the activity, Dynetics was bringing a launcher based off the Army’s internally developed, but then canceled, Multi-Mission Launcher along with the Raytheon-produced AIM-9X Sidewinder interceptor.

Dynetics would not tell reporters what interceptor it brought to the live-fire event as part of its offering due to an internal decision based on the interceptor manufacturer’s desire not to name it, Ronnie Chronister, the company’s, senior vice president for weapons technology and manufacturing, said during a June 3 briefing.

“Our selection of that effector was based on the fact that the Army’s sense of urgency was very high in getting capability into the field,” he said.

But, its launcher — Enduring Shield — takes the work the company did to help the Army develop the MML and improves upon it, Chronister said.

“Our offering is not MML,” he said, “but it is derived from the heritage and the things that we’ve learned from MML.”

Chronister said the company redesigned the stack system of the MML to obtain cost efficiencies and has worked to make the launcher more producible and less complex, which is critical to the Army’s requirement to build 16 launchers and 80 interceptors in a short period of time.

“Our offering has a 360-degree envelope and an ability to engage multiple targets simultaneously,” he said, and has been demonstrated to fully integrate with the Army’s Integrated Battle Command System (IBCS), a key requirement.

The system is built with a modular open system architecture, Chronister said, and so the company can fire any interceptor from the launcher.

“We are basically missile agnostic,” he said, “so if the customer comes back and wants to integrate another effector into our system, we have designed it such that that integration will be seamless and relatively easy to accomplish.”

While it is known that the MML had trouble with reloading and the AIM-9X had issues with overheating, Chronister said that with changes to the launcher, all issues — found over three years ago — have been resolved including the thermal problems with the interceptor itself.

“We are very comfortable with the solutions that we have implemented,” he said.

The company has relevant experience designing launchers from its history on the MML program to its current efforts to build the launcher for the Army’s ground-launched hypersonic missile. Dynetics is also building the first glide bodies for those hypersonic missiles.

The company received the contract roughly 20 months ago to build the launcher for hypersonic missiles and, Chronister said, it is already delivering hardware to the Army.

And Dynetics has experience on the IFPC program itself, developing a 300-kilowatt laser on a Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck, to serve as a possible countermeasure for an enduring solution.

Taking its work on cyber and electronic warfare system hardening, Dynetics is also baking into its IFPC solution capability to protect it from such attacks, according to Chronister.

The Army is expected to choose a winner to proceed in building an initial lot of prototypes in the fourth quarter of FY21. And the winner must deliver all prototypes to the Army in time to reach initial operational capability by the fourth quarter of 2023.

“We feel very confident in our ability to meet this aggressive schedule that the Army has laid out,” Chronister said. “We have invested our own internal funds, our research and development funds into this program, so we have skin the game with this one.”

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