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Defense News asked BCE Consulting the following questions at AUSA Annual

1. What are you seeing as the key themes in air defense? 2. What is critical to constructing a layered air defense architecture

And 3. What do future requirements need to center on? Here's what they said

You need a mix of systems, short range, medium range, long range, theater high altitude, and then ground-based midcourse, which is the one that's up in Alaska

What you need are short-range systems that are more suitable to protect the maneuver force

So you get armor and infantry that are forward. The M-Shore RAD systems, short-range systems, are important to protect those assets right there

You need a medium range capability so that you don't have as far forward as the

shore rad units are but they kind of maybe something around 25 30 kilometers Then you have a longer range with Patriot to take out ballistic missiles and those types

of targets. Then there's further on back in the theater, you will have theater high altitude air defense

and that's called THAAD, and that looks at extra atmospheric. And then the ground-based midcourses will defend the United States

We have to put the shore rad systems into the divisions and get them out into the maneuver force

They've been doing that for about two or three years now, and they're making a lot of progress

The second piece of this is you need to have Patriot and medium-range systems to defend critical assets that are back in the division and core area

The big piece of this is Integrated Battle Command that is there for the command and control

You can tie all those systems together with the IBCS program