Marine Corps officials on Tuesday got a look at the first Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) that has rolled off the BAE Systems production line.
The eight-wheeled, 690-horsepower armored personnel carrier is the first of 16 the company will build for the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the ACV 1.1 program. It sits a dozen feet from SAIC’s [SAIC] competing ACV offering center stage at the Modern Day Marine Military Expo here.
The vehicle came off BAE’s York, Pa., production line last week and will be delivered to the Marine Corps after six weeks of contractor and operating break-in testing that will begin next week at the Nevada Automotive Test Center.
Four other ACVs are in various stages of production and automotive build while the remaining 11 vehicles have all begun hull welding, according to John Swift, BAE’s ACV program manager. The company plans to deliver the vehicles in four sets of four vehicles over a four-month period.
All 16 are being built in the same “production environment” in which its production vehicle would be built during low-rate initial production (LRIP) if BAE is selected when the Marine Corps downselects to one vendor, Swift said. The vehicle was designed by Italy’s Iveco Defense for that country’s marines. Italy’s version of the ACV is in the midst of an extensive test campaign that also will inform BAE’s LRIP proposal to the Marine Corps, said Nazario Bianchini, Iveco’s ACV manager.
“The process used to build this vehicle, all the drawings, the processes, all that was proven out in EMD,” he said. “So literally we are ready for LRIP. These were built in a production-like environment. All the fixtures, all the tooling, all the build instructions … the processes are all being proven with these 16 vehicles.”
There is a major difference between the vehicle BAE showed at last year’s MDM expo and the one on display this year. Aside from minor engineering changes made during production, the company decided to swap the 500-horsepower engine in its initial offering for a beefy 690-horsepower upgrade.
“We decided to do that redesign now because in the automotive world, replacing the engine, that’s open-heart surgery,” Swift said.
Increasing the vehicle’s power was a preemptive move to ensure the vehicle has room to grow through the ACV 1.1 program into follow-on ACV 1.2 and 2.0, which will introduce progressively more and more sophisticated requirements, including high water speed and possibly tracks instead of wheels.
There currently is no Marine Corps requirement for a top-mounted remote weapon system, but the Italians do have a requirement for an unmanned turret. Therefore, BAE’s offering has growth capacity and built-in support structure to host an unmanned 30 mm turret, Swift said.
BAE and SAIC survived a five-way battle to win $100-million-plus EMD contracts for ACV 1.1. General Dynamics [GD], Lockheed Martin [LMT] and Advanced Defense Vehicle Systems (ADVS) were culled from the competition after an initial round of evaluations. GD protested the decision for 90 days but was denied by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
“We’ve been on a very tight schedule and although the contract was protested for 90 days, we continued to work through that,” Swift said. “They key to working through the protest was not to impress anybody … was to prove out the processes and reduce risk because it affords us more time to validate the work instructions, validate the manufacturing processes and also have more time, if needed, for our own break-in operator testing.”
While the ACV 1.1 vehicles do not fulfill all the requirements the Marine Corps has for an ACV, both are significant upgrades from the current assault amphibious vehicle (AAV), even the upgraded version that is being built by SAIC.
Both vehicles dramatically improve upon the AAV’s land speed, maintainability, reliability and survivability. Swift said the BAE offering is twice as survivable as an AAV and on par if not more survivable than a Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicle.
Iveco’s proprietary drive-train system has no axels and instead uses independent drive trains for each of its wheels, allowing them to perform like tracks. It also allows the hull to have a deep, blast-deflecting V shape. A blast plate adds further protection while the floor and seats of the troop compartment are suspended from the superstructure of the vehicle rather than bolted to the bottom of the hull.
BAE is embarking on a meticulous test campaign on its own dime to ensure it has voluminous data to present the Marine Corps to inform its decision on which vehicle will enter LRIP, Swift said. The six-week test campaign will include swim and land driving, slope and break testing among other evaluations.
Iveco already has performed most of the testing on the vehicle it is building for the Italian marines. It has completed automotive performance testing and began swim testing three weeks ago, Swift said. Ship-board testing where the vehicles will launch and re-board Italian amphibious ships is scheduled for November off Brindisi in the heel of Italy’s boot.
“What we want to do is collect as much internal test data as possible in the coming year, for fear that if the government test schedule … gets pushed back or delayed, we have our own data then that we can incorporate into our LRIP/full-rate proposal at the end of next year,” Swift said. “If the U.S. Navy is unable to provide a ship before the proposal is due, we will have test data from Iveco. We think these things through.”
