Ground Combat Vehicle Titans’Ground Combat Vehicle Titans’ futuristic designs offer Army rich choices.
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The Army is reviewing new proposals for design and development work on the planned ground combat vehicle
(GCV) that have much in common, but also offer some clear differences that will be decisive in determining which team of companies ultimately will build this futuristic fighter. With $1 billion at stake just for the design phase to develop the GCV, the acquisition attracted proposals from the A-list of mega-contractors, world-famous firms that have built the best U.S. defense platforms over the past three decades. The lineup includes all six of the six biggest military hardware providers. Each is likely to receive a design contract. Eventually, the competition will neck down to two firms, and ultimately the Army will choose the winner to begin producing the vehicle in 2017. For Army procurement managers, the restructured program leaves them secure in knowing that regardless of which team will someday begin bending steel, the GCV will meet impressive standards: the ability to take a hit from the enemy, such as an IED blast, and the capacity to carry a crew of three and a nine-man infantry squad—along with the ability to accommodate future weapons and systems only dreamt of now—all for a unit price of $9 million to $10.5 million, and an assurance that GCVs will be rolling off the production line by 2017. Since every one of the competing GCV proposals must meet those minimum non-negotiable requirements, that leaves Army officials free to decide which unique features in a given proposal they like best. This will be a three-way war of industrybehemoths:
• The BAE Systems team includes Northrop Grumman providing C4ISR systems and integrating command and control ware, while QinetiQ North America provides a hybrid electric propulsion system. Saft and iRobot also are on
the team, with the latter integrating an unmanned ground vehicle into the GCV system and making provisions
for the GCV to eventually gain autonomous driving capabilities, able to avoid obstacles.
• SAIC has Boeing on its team. The two firms were lead systems integrators of the Future Combat Systems
program, which at one time was the second largest procurement program ever. There also are two German contractors on the team, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall, makers of the Puma vehicle.
• General Dynamics is also fielding a team with heavy hitters, including Lockheed Martin providing the turret, lethal and non-lethal effects and more, while Raytheon provides hit avoidance, indirect vision and sensor integrator expertise, and MTU Detroit Diesel contributes propulsion.
So what are these teams offering that warfighters will be taking into combat?
BAE Systems
The BAE team is offering vast experience and lessons learned in the past, paired with the technology of tomorrow, according to Mark Signorelli, vice president of the BAE ground combat vehicle program, who spoke with Ground Combat Technology in an interview. One major differentiator in the BAE GCV lies in its propulsion system: a hybrid electric drive that provides immense torque for climbing steep hills and boulders in rocky Afghan terrain, while also providing excellent mileage to an Army that uses a gigantic amount of petro fuels, much of it made from oil sold by nations that threaten the United States. (The Department of Defense is seeking ways to cut oil consumption, ranging from aircraft running on synthetic fuels, to base installations running on electricity from clean tech sources.) While no GCV weighing tens of thousands of pounds will offer more miles per gallon than a family econo-box car, the BAE GCV will be, in relative terms, high mileage.
“In general we’re about ten percent more efficient than a similarly capable mechanical drive system” on a regular armored vehicle, Signorelli said. “And when you look at an extended deployment time frame, 180 days, the benefit starts to grow, and you’re probably more in the range of 20 percent more fuel efficient. 10 percent is a very relevant savings. But when you start to talk about 20 percent fuel savings over an extended deployment, that truly becomes significant from a logistics standpoint.” The less fuel vehicles use, the less fuel the Army must ship to the combat zone. And going with the hybrid electric system offers other major benefits, Signorelli said: It provides abundant electrical power not only to offer juice to the high-tech gadgetry that soldiers increasingly use, but also, over time, to power sciencefiction weapons. The BAE GCV design will be “able to accommodate growth for the future, and that’s growth in [vehicle] weight, available power, cooling, all those sorts of things that cause you to look forward to the addition of capabilities” as new technology is developed for combatants, Signorelli noted. For instance, within just seven years, Signorelli predicted, soldiers will begin using the first laser weapons on the battlefield. Such weapons will mark a giant leap forward in war fighting capabilities—but only if the electrical power is there to drive them. The BAE GCV plan “looks forward, we believe, for the next 20 to 30 years and beyond for the Army,” he said.
This isn’t just about weaponry that isn’t even on the drawing boards, he noted. The BAE GCV design takes care to accommodate technologies of today, while using them in a different manner. “You have to be very innovative for the integration of technologies, even though those technologies may be currently available and very mature,” he observed. “Sometimes innovation isn’t in doing something new, but in using existing things in new ways.” Signorelli summed up why the BAE team is taking what some see as a bold, even radical, step of putting hybrid electric drive and other innovations into the BAE GCV. “With the hybrid electric drive approach that we’ve adopted, it provides exceptional performance today in terms of … space, weight, acceleration, torque, all those traditional performance standards,” he explained. “But it also provides that large amount of available [electric] power so that as new technologies start to emerge—whether those are communications, sensors, jammers, directed energy weapons like microwave or laser weapons—you have that power available to accommodate those new systems.” With improvised explosive devices being a major cause of U.S. casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq, Signorelli said the BAE GCV also is designed to protect soldiers from devastating injuries when mines detonate. “What we’ve done is we’ve [designed] a vehicle from the soldier outward,” Signorelli said, with the BAE team “focusing initially on force protection: How do you protect the soldier from blast?” For example, that means carefully designing the vehicle hull to deflect the IED blast, he noted. While HMWWVs have flat bottoms that crumple in a blast, more advanced designs feature a V-shaped hull to deflect the explosive force outward. Other blast mitigation features include shock-absorbing seats. In the BAE GCV design, attention was paid to the kind of material used in the vehicle, “the kind of seats and restraints that you use,” including shock absorbing seats and proper harnesses, Signorelli explained. All of this combines “to help build a very highly protected envelope around soldiers,” he noted. Turning to another key Army requirement, that the GCV be developed and ready for production in 2017, Signorelli stressed the vast experience that BAE offers. BAE’s position is that size counts, noting that it is the largest global producer of combat vehicles, a company that provides nearly 80 percent of the vehicles in the Heavy Brigade Combat Team. BAE in 2007 acquired Armor Holdings. And BAE some time ago acquired United Defense, which made the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. BAE still upgrades the vehicle. “Bradley is today the most survivable infantry fighting vehicle in the world,” Signorelli said. “We’re very proud of that record.” The Bradley is a tracked asset. Aside from touting their experience in armored vehicles, the BAE team will stress that they will offer a fully new vehicle, rather than a redesign or mod of an old platform. “We believe that in order to really meet those requirements, it is a new vehicle,” Signorelli said. Yet another BAE selling point will be an assertion that the company can bring its GCV in on budget and on schedule, with production beginning in 2017, partly by avoiding the use of risky technologies. Many lawmakers in Congress are looking for defense programs to cut and aren’t likely to countenance a procurement program that may well generate huge cost overruns. “You’re not going to develop a lot of new technologies in order to meet that schedule,” he explained. “In order to meet this growth requirement, you’ve got to take the technologies that are available today and integrate them into the package.” Not only will the BAE proposal be low risk in terms of armored vehicle design, production experience and use of mature technologies, it also will combat the risk of obsolescence in the years while the GCV is being developed, before production begins, he said. As new technologies are developed, the BAE platform will be designed to accommodate them. As soldiers become ever more laden with high-tech hardware carried into combat, the weight of fully equipped troops rises, and their demand for electricity for all that gear rises as well. Signorelli complimented the Army for an excellent job in revising the request for proposals from industry in the GCV development program, setting several no-compromise requirements that industry must meet while offering flexibility on how industry would meet other goals. “The Army has done a very good job, we think, in laying those parameters out and being clear on them, so industry has the opportunity to make the kind of choices and trades that allow us to achieve those goals,” Signorelli said. “And I think that they’ve been very deliberative and very smart. They haven’t given us contradictory requirements or mutually exclusive requirements.”
SAI C and Its Team
SAIC will have a multi-pronged sales pitch for the Army, blending something old and something new. The company will argue that it is an old hand at developing the next generation of Army vehicles, from the years that SAIC and team member Boeing spent leading the Future Combat Systems program. FCS cost billions in public funds, and the Army can recoup much of that investment by choosing SAIC to develop the future GCV. This team also will be able to keep the GCV program on schedule by starting at the drawing board with a vehicle that already exists and using mature technologies instead of fantasy tech, SAIC will argue. At the same time, SAIC will assert that its GCV proposal has something new: It will be based on the only combat vehicle developed in a post 9/11 world filled with IEDs and suicide bombers. The German-engineered Puma is custom designed for the 21st century battlefield that U.S. forces now face, said Dan Zanini, SAIC’s GCV program head. The Puma is “a vehicle that has all the lessons associated with warfare, operating in an IED-infested environment, and one where you must be able to operate both in a very complex urban environment, as well as the very rugged, high altitudes of an environment like Afghanistan,” Zanini said. So the Puma “deals with force protection … where you can deal very clearly with an IED threat and others similar to that. This vehicle was designed to that end.” The Puma is a tracked vehicle. Zanini emphasized that SAIC comes to the table with its own and Boeing’s experience in leading FCS, paired with the experience of teammates Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall in developing the Puma. While SAIC won’t offer the Puma for the U.S. Army GCV, the SAIC design proposal will draw on the Puma heavily, thereby lessening risk of unproven designs and technology, he noted. “We are able to leverage the only ground combat vehicle built and delivered to its customer in the post-9/11 period, after the conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan had begun,” Zanini noted. “And so the Puma … is a vehicle that has many of the lessons learned from the Iraq and Afghanistan campaign embedded into its design.”
That means the Army can achieve a win-win situation by selecting the SAIC design for the GCV, he asserted. “Our offering is to take that base vehicle and leverage the maturity of that design and the lessons learned applied to it, and the investments made in that vehicle, and couple that with the investments and knowledge that the U.S. government made in pursuing FCS,” he said. The team will then add to that “the investments made by industry both in FCS and in competitive systems that could have competed in FCS, and certainly will compete in the ground combat vehicle system.” The result is the sum total of American know-how and German engineering. Zanini also pointed to the experience of his team beyond the four giant U.S. and German firms, citing as well the second-tier companies in the SAIC team. “It provides a very compelling team and a very compelling offering for the United States Army,” Zanini said. Another feature of the SAIC GCV will be its ability to adapt and adopt future technologies as they are developed, Zanini said. The proposal will start out with the best technology of today. “That will be integrated to meet the requirements you see laid out in the RFP,” he observed. “And then we have a very robust architecture that allows you to upgrade the vehicle over time, even during the development and testing phase, so that when the vehicle is produced some six to seven years from now, it is not only current with today’s technology, but it’ll be current with the technology that’s available in that window of time.” All of that means SAIC not only will be able to meet the Army’s hard-line requirement for GCV production to begin no later than 2017, Zanini said, but the SAIC team can beat that seven-year deadline as well. “The seven-year delivery schedule is not only meetable but in
fact beatable, given the maturity of our design,” Zanini predicted. “And as we move forward through the technical development phase and into the [development and testing] phase with our customer, we will continue to offer to them opportunities where we think delivery can be accelerated.” He also expressed strong confidence that the SAIC entry will be able to protect troops from injuries when roadside mines detonate, toss the vehicle upward and slam it down. In response to how well it counters IEDs, Zanini replied, “We’re very comfortable with the design we have. It meets all of the force protection requirements that have been laid out by the Army, to deal not only with IEDs and mine-type activities, but from the external threats that strike the vehicle as well,” such as RPGs or other enemy weapons. As for armament, the SAIC GCV gun “will be a 30 mm, upgradeable to 40 mm,” Zanini explained. “And all the fire control systems and the like will accommodate that growth opportunity.” While not the Puma itself, the SAIC design will offer “the best of Puma and the best of U.S. industry,” he continued. “The final design will be an Americanized design and produced in the United States.”
In an era where knowledge means survival for combatants, Zanini said the SAIC GCV would be fully netted, keeping both the crew and the soldiers in back fully informed of the situation outside the vehicle. “Situational understanding, situational awareness for the crew and the squad in the rear of the vehicle is a key part of having an infantry squad that is not only empowered while they’re on the vehicle with knowledge, but are prepared when they depart the vehicle for combat missions,” he said. “The worst thing in the world is to ride around in the back end of a box, and the ramp goes down and you’re going into a fight and you don’t know where you are. We’ll prevent that from happening.” Zanini summed up the SAIC team position this way: “We’ve got with Krauss-Maffei and Rheinmetall, Boeing and SAIC a world-class team,” he said. “We’ve got a world-class offering leveraging the investments made by our allies in Europe in a post-9/11 vehicle, coupled with the investments made by … our government and industry in both FCS and in maturing technologies for the current force that were employed in Iraq and Afghanistan, coupling those together into a vehicle that will meet requirements of today with growth potential for tomorrow. I think we’ve got a great offering.”
General Dynamics
General Dynamics and its teammates have enormous experience in developing defense platforms, and their immense combined size makes them a formidable competitor. Team leader GD is a firm that has made many military vehicles, including the tracked Abrams Main Battle Tank and the wheeled Stryker. The GD proposal uses mature technologies paired with a design to protect soldiers against IED blasts. It also will feature fully networked interoperability. To show what gigantic firms such as GD, Lockheed and Raytheon can do when they team together, they considered more than 1 million design combinations and permutations in creating their proposal. Those teammates have been involved in more than 70 percent of the current fleet of combat vehicles and weapons systems, according to GD, noting that its General Dynamics Land Systems unit has more than seven decades’ experience in designing, developing, integrating and sustaining ground combat vehicles. In its new design phase proposal just submitted to the Army, GD will be the prime contractor, manage the program and lead vehicle design and integration, and also will provide soldier interfaces, vehicle structure and chassis, squad and crew environments, integrated survivability and safety, and distributed systems. So the battle of the firms is underway, each company with immense experience and expertise in many technological areas, but especially in designing, building and modernizing ground combat vehicles. The Army can benefit in an array of choices, where the biggest winner will be the warfighters who will use the ground combat vehicle.