A reload crew of Patriot Launching Station Enhanced Operator and Maintainers with Delta Battery, 1st Battalion, 1st Air Defense Artillery Regiment, 38th ADA Brigade, performs reload operations on their air defense system on Oct. 28, 2024 during the battery's deployment in support of Keen Sword 2025.
WASHINGTON — The Army plans to add additional battalions to its most stressed element, one of the service’s top leaders said.
The Army will stand up to four additional Patriot battalions including one to bolster the Guam Defense System, said the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James J. Mingus. American forces use a layered and integrated defense system to safeguard the strategic U.S. territory against missile threats.
Considered one of the Army’s best air defense system, the MIM-104 Patriot utilizes command and control and radar to identify and stop enemy missiles. Patriot battalions successfully defended Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar against Iranian missiles in June.
In addition, the new battalions will use the Lower Tier Air and Missile Defense Sensor or LTAMDS to vastly extend the Patriots’ range, Mingus said at a recent Strategic Landpower Dialogue at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. LTAMDS possesses a greater capability to identify and defeat enemy threats, including low-altitude cruise missiles, hypersonics, short-range ballistic missiles and can detect and defeat multiple targets. It also has the capability to perform at a full 360-surveillance mode compared to the older models of the Army’s Q series, AN/MPQ-65 radar system which had a 270-degree limit.
Mingus explained that the range of LTAMDS extends from 85 kilometers up to 85 km down.
“So it greatly expands the range, the altitude, and it's a 360,” Mingus said. “So you could take those same 15 Patriot battalions we have today, give it [Integrated Battle Command System] and LTAMs, and fundamentally when you operationally employ it, it's immediately doubling that capability.”
“You would have the equivalent of about 30 Patriot battalions because instead of having to deploy as batteries, you can break them up and disperse them in a much more tactical way,” he added.
Last December, the Army performed two successful operational assessment flight tests at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.
In the future, the majority of threats Soldiers will face will be in the skies, making air defense more critical.
“And so instead of point defense defending points on the ground, we have to go on the offense when it comes to air defense [and] bring those together in a much more comprehensive fires function,” Mingus said.
Air defense provides a critical element of the Army’s multi-domain operations in future battles. Mingus said that the Army must operate in all domains, not just on land, and success on combat hinges on cooperation among all military branches and the joint force.
“The very essence of maneuver is fires and movement combined together,” he said. “We fire so we can move, and we move so we can put more effective fires on the adversary. Put those together as a joint force, land helping maritime, air helping land, maritime helping.
None of us are going to be able to do this by ourselves in the future … Working back and forth together, that is the future of the joint force.”
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