VEHICULAR VISIONS
VEHICULAR VISIONS
T
ime was, not long ago, that the only vision for a new Army combat vehicle was the Army’s. Te service would
develop a requirement detailing, down to thread size, the precise design and parts that should go into the vehicle. Industry had a choice: Take it or leave it. Invest and engage in building the vehicle, or don’t.
In his 14 years at General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), “I saw require- ments that were so specific that if you had three people with that requirements
document in front of them and they built three vehicles, all three vehicles looked exactly alike,” said Mike Peck, GDLS’ director of business development. Tus,
“you have just eliminated any innovation that they could possibly think of.”
Not so with the way the Army Capa- bilities
Integration Center (ARCIC) is
executing the Army’s combat vehicle modernization strategy. Combat vehicles need to provide Soldiers with speed, pro- tection, lethality and the ability to wage a multidomain battle, working in concert with other ground forces to overwhelm the enemy with multiple simultaneous challenges.
MOVING QUICKLY FOR MPF
BAE Systems displayed its Mobile Protected Firepower prototype at the Association of the United States Army (AUSA) Annual Meeting & Exposition in October 2016 in Washington. Events like AUSA provide industry with opportunities to showcase technologies and further conversations with the government to develop requirements for new capabilities. (Photo courtesy of BAE Systems)
A ‘TOTALLY NEW’ VEHICLE Te Army particularly needs the as-yet nonexistent Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) vehicle to support infantry bri- gade combat teams—a lightweight vehicle that can be airlifted into battle and maneuver, dispersed if necessary, in close-quarters urban terrain, but with lethal long-range firepower to take out enemy armored vehicles. Te idea is to defeat enemy positions and destroy their light armored vehicles pre-emptively to provide U.S. forces with greater freedom of movement. MPF is now the Army’s highest mid-term priority in combat vehicle modernization.
“We’re going to need a totally new combat vehicle, and we don’t even know what it looks like,” said Lt. Col. Andy Sanchez, chief of ARCIC’s Maneuver, Aviation
36
and Soldier Division. “Tere’s a huge effort to begin to look at offensive capa- bilities that can attack an enemy even before, ideally, the first kinetic or lethal munition has been fired. Ideally, you ren- der an enemy at least degraded, making him fight degraded, before he’s even put boots on the ground. And when you can get into an adversary’s decision cycle with those types of capabilities, it makes them think differently about certain courses of action.”
Five to 10 years ago, “industry was pretty much nonproactive” in building new platforms, Peck said, “almost a slave to waiting for that RFI [request for infor- mation], RFP [request for proposals], sources-sought kind of announcement.” By contrast, in 2013, the Army started asking industry what it could do about MPF.
“We started talking about the potential for using old and new vehicles, what was in the possible range,” said Jim Miller, director of business development at BAE Systems. “It’s been several years of talk- ing. A lot of the up-front discussions have proven to be very beneficial,” including those with ARCIC and the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Develop- ment and Engineering Center.
EARLY SIGNS OF SUCCESS ARCIC disseminated its draft MPF requirements document to industry and held an MPF industry day in early August 2016 at Fort Benning, Georgia, that was
Army AL&T Magazine
January-March 2017
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