HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – The Army wants next-generation combat vehicle prototypes for soldiers to test within four years, at which point it will decide whether to replace the Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle or both.
It isn’t yet known which legacy vehicle the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle (NGCV) will replace, said Col. William Nuckols, director of the Mounted Requirements Division at the Army Maneuver Center of Excellence.
“Were not certain if it’s going to be a replacement for the Bradley, in other words if it’s going to be an infantry fighting vehicle, or if it’s going to be a replacement for the tank, Abrams … or potentially both,” he said. “It could be a family of vehicles.”
This year the Army will establish an NGCV “integrated concept development team” that will begin to sort out the requirements for a new combat vehicle. By fiscal 2022, the Army expects to build two technology demonstrators – much in the vein of the current Future Vertical Lift effort to develop the next-generation rotorcraft – to evaluate.
“We plan to build these tech demonstrators collaboratively with our stakeholder partners … and with industry and put them into the hands of soldiers no later than fiscal year [20]22,” he said. That includes the Army’s Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center (TARDEC) and Communications-Electronics Research, Development and Engineering Center (CERDEC).
Photo: General Dynamics
If one of the prototypes satisfies the Army’s requirements for an NGCV, it will become a program of record and begin fielding in the early 2030s, Nuckols said. That date is based on the Army’s current combat vehicle acquisition strategy and the “bureaucracies associated with that,” he said.
“We could go faster,” he said. “Once the technology demonstrators are completed and we assess the technologies and we make some refinements to our requirements, we could go earlier.”
The eventual vehicle will have integrated technologies that allow autonomous and/or remote operation. It also likely will be equipped with a laser and powered by a new engine that could be hybrid-electric or hydrogen fueled, Nuckols said.
“We have come up with an initial list of attributes that we think we need from a next-generation combat vehicle that we think will satisfy the capabilities we need,” Nuckols said.
“We’re really looking at everything and trying to see where the sweet spot is in terms of waiting for something to develop and not waiting so long that we’re left with 50-year-old Bradleys and 50-year-old Abrams that we nurse along for that entire time.”
Aside from robotics and directed-energy weapons, those attributes also include lighter weight materials and deployability. What the Army must avoid is allowing its appetite for technology to sink the NGCV program like Future Combat Systems (FCS)or the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) before it, Nuckols said.
“As we begin this effort, we are extremely aware of lessons learned from the past and present, both good and bad,” Nuckols said, referring to the Army’s dismal record of combat vehicle development.
The NGCV team will pull not only from failed programs like Future Combat Systems and the Ground Combat Vehicle, but also Stryker and Future Vertical Lift to hedge against falling into an FCS trap where the appetite for technology drives development into the ground, he said.
“FCS was about the promise of technology and waiting forever for those technologies to finally come down the chimney with Santa Claus,” he said. “We are not taking that approach. We have some aspirational operational capabilities that we would like to have, but we are going into this with our eyes open and we will make decisions along the way on whether or not even to continue with NGCV.”
It may work out that the technologies discovered during the NGCV requirements generation process are better suited for retrofitting on existing combat vehicles, he said.
“We acknowledge that could be a potential course of action,” Nuckols said. “Whether we start fielding right after the tech demonstration or not will be based on the technologies that are available, the affordability of those technologies and then how we can integrate those into a platform that does what we need it to do.”