and got inside it. … It created that dialogue between Army and industry that is essential for doing anything quickly, for informing Army requirements or helping the Army refine those requirements, by providing that conversation piece,” Sellers said.
THE GRIFFIN LANDS
GDLS displayed its Griffin tech demonstrator at the AUSA Annual Meeting & Exposition. The tech demonstrator offered a tangible starting point for government-industry conversations about the Army’s requirements for MPF, with the ultimate goal of avoiding requirements so prescriptive that they rule out the possibility of industry innovation. (Photo courtesy of General Dynamics)
hosted by the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence. Te resulting discussions have included the timeline and costs for developing MPF. “Te process … has been pretty successful so far,” said Miller, who noted that major corporate investments are riding on certain key decisions the Army makes up front on a combat vehicle, including its size, weight, survivability, crew size and the kind of aircraft that will transport it.
Miller said a big problem in requirements development of the past has been late-breaking decisions or revisions of key per- formance parameters. Te process of developing requirements needs to settle these major decisions up front, he said. “And then you get to the smaller things that the Army wants, all the way to the widgets. It helps us decide how we want to spend our money.”
Te lines of communication between ARCIC and industry on what the Army wants in the MPF have been open enough that GDLS was able to put together a technology demonstrator in five months for the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting & Exposition in October 2016 in Washington. It wasn’t just “come up with a solution [and] hope for the best,” as in past years, Peck said.
GDLS’ tech demonstrator—called the Griffin, and not a prototype but at least “a conversation piece that is much more than a PowerPoint,” as Patricia Sellers, GDLS business development manager, put it—got underway even before the industry day, incorporating characteristics that the company thought the Army might want, such as in the turret and gun. “And the Army looked at [the Griffin] and touched it
CONCLUSION Te Army’s combat vehicle modernization strategy as a whole envisions both new vehicles and incremental technological improvements, informed by a continuous assessment, adap- tation and innovation of capabilities, including commercial off-the-shelf solutions. Power generation, gun design, transport- ability and autonomous technologies will be just a few big pieces of the bigger picture, and they’re not likely to come together all at once, but in iterative stages of modernization that require detailed discussion, just as the double-V hull was introduced to the Stryker platform in 2011 to improve survivability. Given what the Army is looking to achieve with the MPF, it might just have to be magical. Or science fiction. But today’s science fiction is often tomorrow’s science fact.
ARCIC wants industry to know that “we’re not just thinking about tomorrow’s war, we’re thinking out toward, you know, 2035. We’ve projected the future in terms of near-, mid- and far-term periods, near-term being now until about 2021, mid- term from 2022 to 2031, and 2031 and beyond is considered far-term,” said Sanchez. “It helps them better see things through the reality of funding that we have to work in. So when they’re delivering, they’re delivering to something in those time periods.”
At the same time, Sanchez acknowledged, our known and potential enemies are developing similar capabilities. “So it’s just a matter of who gets to the better platforms first and who develops the better techniques first.”
With its combat vehicle modernization strategy, which the Army can revise as needed, “we have a living document,” San- chez said, that will enable the Army to avoid the mistakes of the doomed Ground Combat Vehicle, canceled in 2010 after the requirements got out of control and the vehicle was deemed unaffordable. Te increasingly collaborative and iterative process of requirements development gives the Army an oppor- tunity to discover immediately useful technology and spin it out into capabilities the Soldier can use on the battlefield right now. For things that are conceivable but not yet possible, it gives the Army a much better idea of what needs to be parked for now and what can be driven today.
—MS. MARGARET C. ROTH
ASC.ARMY.MIL 37
ACQUISITION
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