- A British Army Colonel confirmed several demonstrators associated with MIPS will reach TRL 7 sometime in 2026
- Since January 2024, the Leonardo-led Team Minerva began working on demonstrators for the open architecture standard (OAS) and MIPS controller
- It is said that the OAS will support the Army’s effort to “undercut” the cost advantage of attackers operating kinetic drones
After nearly ten years in concept and development under Project Icarus, the UK’s Modular Integrated Protection System, or MIPS, will soon reach technology readiness level seven (TRL 7) in 2026.
“Once each use case has been proven in isolation, we will then bring the system together”, confirmed British Army Colonel James Fern, assistant head of ground manoeuvre, Futures Directorate. He mentioned the update in a speech addressing an audience of global military peers and defence industry leaders during the Future Armoured Vehicles Survivability conference in London on 18 November 2025.
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It was in 2022 when the British Army first committed £15m ($19.6m) to start developing MIPS from TRL 5 to TRL 7 and deliver a series of technology demonstrators across several use cases, including an armoured protection system (APS), counter-uncrewed aerial vehicle (C-UAS), and counter-improvised explosive device.
Ultimately, MIPS is intended to address the active protection of military vehicles against a saturated threat landscape on the ground including conventional anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs) to new generation weapons such as small uncrewed aerial systems (sUAS) and a range of electromagnetic activities.
Vision
“Our vision for MIPS,” Fern elaborated, “is a system capable of identifying, classifying, prioritising, and then protecting against a full spectrum of current and future surface and near surface threats from anti-tank guided missiles to swarms of autonomous kinetic drones to electromagnetic attack.”
It should be understood that MIPS is more than just a single APS integrated onto each military vehicle. Although the wider architecture does incorporate a specific ‘hard kill’ APS on the Challenger 3 main battle tank, namely Trophy, an Israeli system that uses radar sensors to detect and track threats and effectors to intercept them.
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By GlobalDataProviding a better sense of the breadth of MIPS, Fern revealed that “the system is also developing appropriate human-machine interfacing to enable manual, semi-autonomous and autonomous deployment of effects.
“Our aspiration is that this system will be capable of assured target hand-off, enabling threats to be neutralised as far away from the survivable layer as possible.”
Components
“The core onus of MIPS is the… controller,” Fern identified. The MIPS controller is capable of complex multi-source data analysis and information processing, “this is where the magic happens,” he suggested. The processing subsystem will utilise artificial intelligence to this end.
Next among these demonstrators is the OAS. This system will allow defence authorities to configure APSs, connecting various sensor and effector modules on a standardised network for different missions.
“MIPS uses a standardised architecture to integrate sensors and effectors, enabling a nodal web that can keep pace with evolving threats and changing context,” Fern said.
“The open nature of MIPS will also enable us to trial several combinations of effectors for both their efficacy and to drive us back onto the right side of the cost curve,” he hinted, referring to wide cost gap between one-way attack drones and the larger, more costly platforms.
“In the case of kinetic drones, if we can undercut the cost of drone production and neutralise the impact that UAS has on the modern battlefield, we will protect our freedom to manoeuvre.”
