The New Era of Air and Missile Defense

Modern air and missile defense is approaching a structural limit. The model that protected forces over the past two decades remains effective, but only within a narrower envelope than current threats demand. A new approach is required, built on fire-control-level integration, disaggregated survivable architectures, affordable magazine depth, and the integration of offensive action as the central element of defense.

I am a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and now lead international business development and strategy for Northrop Grumman in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. I previously served as chief operating officer of DEFCON AI. As a defense industry executive, I have a direct commercial interest in the integration and command-and-control issues covered here. Northrop Grumman is the prime contractor for the Integrated Battle Command System, the U.S. Army program most closely associated with the fire-control-level integration concepts discussed, so readers should weigh that overlap most carefully in the procurement section, where my analytical argument and my employer’s commercial position are closest. The argument is not for my company’s solution specifically, but for any architecture or federated set of systems that can deliver sensor-shooter integration, disaggregation, survivability, and coalition interoperability.

The reason is simple: The threat has changed faster than the defensive architecture. Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, one-way attack drones, and loitering munitions are no longer niche capabilities employed in small numbers. They are becoming routine instruments of coercion and war, used in combinations designed to overwhelm decision-making, exhaust magazines, expose seams between sensors and shooters, and force defenders into bad cost exchanges. Recent combat has shown that even capable defenses can perform well tactically while still revealing strategic fragility. It is time to invest in systems that are not just able to intercept threats, but do so at the scale, speed, cost, and survivability required for a sustained campaign.

What Combat Has Revealed

Operation Epic Fury and the regional defense that followed against Iranian retaliation provide a clear window into the future of air and missile defense. These were full-scale integrated air defense battles to detect, decide, defend, and attack across domains.

Coalition defenses performed impressively, intercepting large volumes of missiles and unmanned systems and preserving critical infrastructure. But performance alone does not tell the full story. Defensive systems consumed high-end interceptors at rates that would be difficult to sustain in a prolonged campaign. Some attacks penetrated defenses and struck critical assets. Fixed sensing nodes proved vulnerable. And the cost exchange initially favored Iran until coalition offensive operations reduced the volume of incoming threats.

These operational observations are reinforced by public analysis of Israel’s June 2025 war, which documented significant interceptor drawdown, gaps in preparedness and coordination, and the decisive effect of offensive strikes on reducing the volume and intensity of follow-on attacks.

This combination of success and strain is not contradictory. It is the defining feature of modern air and missile defense. It shows that the current model works, but only up to a point. Beyond that point, it begins to fail. The proliferation of low-cost guided air and missile threats has accelerated this shift, as reflected in recent analysis of unmanned system proliferation and missile employment trends.

From the Current Model to Integrated Air Missile Defense 3.0

I use “Integrated Air Missile Defense 3.0” as shorthand for the step change in operational capability and implementation that current threats require. The underlying functions are not new, and joint, service, and allied doctrine have long emphasized integrated capabilities, command and control, and attack operations. What recent combat has clarified are the implementation gaps: where and how current architectures fail under precise, sustained, and massed attacks.

Air and missile defense has evolved in phases. The Cold War model relied on layering separate air defense systems and coordinating defenses through procedures and human decision-making. Later, networked sensors created a shared common operational picture of air and missile threats, enabling forces to share understanding and coordinate responses.

That model remains the foundation of current architectures. However, it has a critical limitation. Systems share information but still fight largely as individual units. Each interceptor depends on its own sensor and must establish its own track before it can engage. Integration exists at the display level rather than at the level required to execute an engagement.

Integrated Air Missile Defense 3.0 moves beyond this constraint. It is defined by fire-control-level integration that allows any sensor to support any shooter. It also leverages disaggregated and mobile architectures that separate sensors from shooters to improve survivability, scalable and affordable engagement layers capable of handling mass attacks, and offensive attack operations as the centerpiece of the defensive construct.

This is less a new theory than a more demanding implementation standard. Recent literature points in the same direction, that future air defense should function as a resilient integrated system, even if coalition politics and military differences constrain how far that integration can go.

None of this is alien to doctrine. Joint doctrine and service doctrine already frame air and missile defense around active defense, passive defense, command and control, and attack operations, and NATO’s 2025 integrated air and missile defense policy applies the same logic. The issue is not whether doctrine recognizes these functions. It is where current architectures fail first when combat shifts from episodic raids to sustained mass attacks.

Why the Current Model Fails

First, magazine exhaustion. Defenders were forced to use advanced and costly interceptors against large numbers of cheaper threats. Public analysis after the June 2025 war highlights heavy use rates of Terminal High Altitude Area Defense and Standard Missiles and the difficulty of replacing sophisticated interceptors quickly. By the tenuous April 2026 ceasefire, the Center for Strategic International Studies assessed that the United States and its partners had expended interceptor inventories that would take years to replenish at current production rates.

Second, limited penetrations still had a strategic effect. Even well-prepared defenses did not create a sealed battlespace, and a small number of successful strikes caused casualties and damaged key assets. A Washington Post satellite-imagery investigation found damage or destruction at 15 U.S. military sites across the region, including key air defense-related equipment, reinforcing that even a few leakers can generate outsized operational and psychological effects. Public analysis of the June war against Iran reinforces the point, noting that some strikes still hit critical sites, including the Kirya in Tel Aviv.

Third, insufficient integration for mass attacks. Coalition defenses demonstrated the value of shared awareness, but also revealed shortfalls in sensor interoperability, redundant communications, data sharing, and command relationships needed for a formal regional construct. Public analyses of recent coalition defenses point to the decisive importance of liaison teams, common operating pictures, data-sharing protocols, and preestablished command relationships in making coalition defense work at speed.

Fourth, cost asymmetry. Advanced interceptors impose technical and financial costs that are hard to sustain against cheap and numerous attackers. Cost exchange is not the only measure that matters, because the value of defended assets matters too. But over time the imbalance still favors the attacker if inventories are stressed faster than industry can replace them.

These are not tactical problems, but architectural limits, and they translate directly into four design requirements: fire-control-level integration, disaggregated survivable architectures, affordable capacity, and attack operations that reduce the salvo at its source.

Integration at the Point of Engagement

The defining feature of Integrated Air Missile Defense 3.0 is integration at the point of engagement. The old model improves coordination, while the new one creates combat power at the tactical edge. This distinction determines whether a defense can keep pace with contemporary threats.

Instead of sharing a common picture, systems share the underlying data needed to generate and sustain targeting solutions. This approach enables multiple sensors to contribute to a single track. Even when targets jam, maneuver, or terrain mask, the network maintains a continuous fire-control solution and allows any sensor to support any shooter.

Command systems assign engagements dynamically and select the best available shooter based on geometry, priority, magazine depth, and the overall tactical situation. Interceptors no longer depend on their organic sensors. The network becomes the fire-control system. This approach enables engagements at the speed and scale required to counter swarms and mass attacks, and creates resilience by allowing the system to adapt when individual sensors are degraded or lost.

Integration also enables disaggregation of sensors and shooters. Sensors and shooters can maneuver independently to optimize performance and survivability. This creates a resilient system that is more difficult to target and degrade.

As demonstrated in recent operations, fixed systems are targets. Mobility is now a requirement for survivability, a trend widely observed in modern conflicts involving precision-guided munitions and persistent surveillance.

Strategic Shift: Defense Alone Will Fail

The most immediate pressure on modern defense systems is economic. High-end interceptors cannot be employed at scale against large numbers of low-cost threats. Integrated Air Missile Defense 3.0 addresses this challenge by incorporating lower-cost engagement layers, including gun-based systems, directed energy, and electronic warfare. These approaches increase magazine depth and allow defenders to counter high-volume threats without exhausting high-end interceptors. Without this shift, even effective defenses will exhaust themselves over time.

While affordable engagement layers help defenders endure mass attack, endurance alone is not enough. Purely defensive approaches will fail over time against massed contemporary air and missile threats because even less sophisticated adversaries can scale attack volumes to exceed defensive capacity. Effective defense must therefore reduce the number of attacks that have to be intercepted in the first place.

Recent combat made the sequence visible. Once U.S. and Israeli offensive actions degraded Iranian air defenses and reduced Iranian launch capacity, launch rates fell, the burden on high-end interceptors eased, and defenders could shift toward cheaper munitions. Offensive action was the mechanism that made defense sustainable.

That sequence also clarifies the link between fire-control-level integration and time-sensitive targeting of mobile launchers. The same sensor-fused picture that supports defensive engagements can cue persistent surveillance, maintain custody of mobile launchers, and move targeting data fast enough to strike launchers before they relocate. The joint command-and-control architecture for that transition should connect warning, active defense, targeting, and offensive counterair within one battle network.

In coalition settings, that architecture also requires pre-delegated authorities. Partners will differ on who can authorize strikes with national assets, what data can be shared for targeting, how airspace and basing are used, and how quickly they are willing to move from defense into offense. Some partners may contribute warning, airspace, basing, or sensor support, while others conduct strikes. Some may specifically prohibit their sensor data from cueing offensive strikes. Those national caveats are a reality of coalition warfare, so the architecture should support user-defined access controls, common operational standards, and clear delegations if operations are to move at speed. Without those authorities and relationships established during peacetime, offensive-defensive integration will remain an aspiration rather than an executable design.

The Hardest Problem Is Institutional

The strongest counterargument to implementing Integrated Air Missile Defense 3.0 is that the architecture described here runs into institutional and political limits long before it runs into technical ones. That critique is legitimate. Sovereign reluctance to share data with neighbors, national engagement authority, classification and releasability rules, mismatched software baselines, and unclear command relationships have historically limited real integration even when partners shared a common picture. Recent coalition-defense writing underscores that many models, tools, and data flows remain not releasable across partners, while U.S. Army writing on command relationships shows that air and missile defense effectiveness depends as much on authorities and area air defense plans as on hardware.

What has changed is not that sovereignty, classification, or releasability barriers have disappeared. It is the combination of operational necessity made clear in repeated combat, along with the emergence of a workable first tier. During my time at U.S. Central Command, restarting regional integrated air and missile defense cooperation meant beginning with coalition-releasable warning data, common terminology, liaison relationships, and a battle rhythm and set of command relationships that could function under stress. Those steps narrowed the political barriers.

That is why phased federation is the practical path to implementation. Coalitions should start with warning and track sharing, then exercise command relationships and delegated authorities in peacetime. Once those arrangements work in exercises, they can expand to battle-management and fire-control integration where policy and technology allow, beginning with tactical-level collaboration in a limited geographic scope. Full integration is the later-stage objective after the political and military foundation is in place.

For commanders and procurement officials, the implication is to evaluate platforms by the battle network or federation they strengthen, rather than as standalone performers. Prioritize systems that let dispersed sensors and shooters fight as a network, preserve magazine depth with affordable layers, remain survivable under precision attack, and build coalition interoperability into the design from the start. The central acquisition test is no longer whether a platform performs well on its own, but whether it integrates with and strengthens the resilience and depth of the larger defensive system fighting as a whole.

Conclusion

Recent combat did not reveal a failure of doctrine so much as a failure to implement it at the speed, scale, and resilience that modern attacks demand. Integrated Air Missile Defense 3.0 is the architectural answer, to integrate at the point of engagement, disaggregate for survivability, build affordable magazine depth, and pair defense with attack operations that reduce the salvo at its source. The militaries that adapt first, and design coalition integration into the architecture from the outset, will be the ones that can absorb and counter mass attacks without being exhausted.

Matthew C. Isler is a retired U.S. Air Force brigadier general and former F-15C fighter pilot. He taught defensive counterair and integrated air and missile defense at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School and served as deputy commander of U.S. Central Command’s air component, where he led U.S. and partner integrated air and missile defense efforts. He later served in the Pentagon, focusing on international partnerships and defense capabilities for allies and partners worldwide. He previously served as chief operating officer of DEFCON AI and now leads international business development and strategy for Northrop Grumman in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.