BAE Systems on Monday won the Army’s competition to build the service’s new Cold-Weather All-Terrain Vehicle (CATV), beating out Oshkosh Defense
[OSK] for the $278.2 million production contract.
The CATV program is intended to replace the Army’s legacy Small Unit Support Vehicles, also built by BAE Systems and in service since the 1980s, and is a key piece of the Army’s new Arctic strategy, which calls for procuring a new platform to offer improved mobility in cold-weather, mountainous conditions.
Work on the new production deal, included in the Pentagon’s contracts announcements, is expected to be completed in August 2029.
BAE Systems’ offering for CATV was the new Beowulf platform, which is an un-armored variant of its BvS10 tracked all-terrain vehicle.
“Beowulf’s design and capabilities are based on our decades of experience with all-terrain vehicles, and over millions of miles logged through our legacy vehicles currently engaged in operations in very challenging environments like the Arctic,” Mark Signorelli, vice president of business development for BAE Systems Platforms & Services, has said previously of the company’s offering.
BAE Systems’ Hägglunds division currently builds the BvS10 armored vehicle for Sweden, the Netherlands, Austria, France and the U.K, to include signing a $200 million deal with Sweden last May for delivery of 127 more vehicles (Defense Daily, May 3 2021).
Both BAE Systems and Oshkosh Defense officially submitted their bids for the CATV production deal in March, after both companies had participated in a prototype evaluation phase that concluded in early 2022 (Defense Daily, March 23).
Oshkosh Defense had teamed with Singapore’s ST Engineering to offer a version of its Bronco 3 platform for CATV.