The Army’s also planning multiple upgrades for the 1980s-vintage Patriot. The simplest is a new digital processor for the radar. “You guys can’t imagine, we have a processor that’s twenty years old,” Shyu said scornfully. “It’s a brick.”

The Patriot will also get a new radar, an active electronically scanned array (AESA) with greater range and sharper discrimination. Industry could deliver this “lower tier AESA” today, Shyu said, and the planned program start is 2017, but budget cuts may slow that down.

Most dramatically, Patriot is already getting a new missile, the Missile Segment Enhanced (MSE) currently in low-rate initial production. “It provides much higher altitude, much longer range,” Shyu said. As a result, she said “this is a missile that in high demand across the different COCOMs today. We can’t produce it fast enough.”