QUANTICO, Va.—On Tuesday morning at the Modern Day Marine exposition, Lockheed Martin [LMT] will unveil its new offering for the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) program: an 8×8 wheeled vehicle it developed itself after splitting with Finnish vehicle maker Patria.
The new offering carries over some features of the 8×8 Havoc vehicle the company originally planned to submit for the ACV competition, such as its blast hull and suspension architecture. However, Lockheed Martin officials said the vehicle offers more excess capacity for future upgrades—something they see as critical for the next phase of the program.
“We meet all the current Marine Corps requirements, and we think that if they have future requirements, we have the growth capability to put those on there,” Becky Withrow, Lockheed Martin’s business development manager for tactical missiles and combat maneuver systems, said during an exclusive interview with Defense Daily. The vehicle can be reconfigured for different missions, and “we have the ability to integrate different sensors, different weapons. So it’s just a more versatile vehicle that what we had previously.”
For the first increment of the competition, called ACV 1.1, the Marine Corps wants a vehicle that can move 10 Marines plus a three-person crew from sea to shore in sea states with waves up to two feet. The vehicle must have the land speed, survivability and maneuverability of a M1 Abrams tank. However, having extra growth capacity is seen as key for future increments of the competition, which could entail the service procuring a brand new ACV variant or buying an upgraded version of ACV 1.1.
Lockheed Martin addressed that need by building into its new vehicle a 25 percent reserve buoyancy—which will allow it to swim as new equipment or weapons are added—and a 25 percent weight growth margin, said Frank Bohlmann, the company’s director of ground vehicle weapon systems. Other key attributes include a 711-horsepower Caterpillar [CAT] C13711 engine and an adjustable ride-height suspension and driveline components built by Horstman.
“We kept the same suspension architecture, but we upgraded the components so we could allow for growth in vehicle weight, growth in payload for the future,” he said.
Lockheed Martin’s 33-ton gross weight ACV can carry 11 combat-equipped Marines and a three-man crew, and can be reconfigured to carry two additional troops. It can hit speeds exceeding 60 miles per hour on land and 5 knots in the water. The per-unit cost is less than the $5 million cost requirement, Withrow said.
The company decided to maintain the same blast hull as the Havoc because it performed well during technology demonstrations, Bohlmann said. “We’ve tailored it a little bit to the final requirements that the Marine Corps has, but it’s the same design.”
Merrill Technologies Group in Saginaw, Mich., would fabricate the vehicle, while Lockheed Martin would complete the final assembly, integration and testing.
Lockheed Martin has conducted thruster tests, demonstrations with a subscale model of the vehicle and modeling and simulation analysis. However, it will not begin testing a full size vehicle—including conducting swim tests— until early next year.
Bohlmann said he’s confident that won’t put Lockheed Martin’s new ACV offering behind its competitors, which have been able to incorporate Marine Corps feedback from blast and amphibious trials during the Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC) program—the now-canceled precursor to the ACV where many of the competitors tested their proposed offerings. Lockheed Martin took part in those demonstrations with the Havoc.
“We did learn quite a bit in the MPC program and baked all of those lessons learned when we laid out this vehicle,” he said. “We’re using the same analytical suite of tools that the Marine Corps is using to evaluate the performance [during current tests], and they’ll use those to evaluate all these competitors, so we feel pretty comfortable about where our swim performance is.”
Lockheed Martin and Patria announced they had ended their partnership in July, months after the former had submitted its solo bid for the program. “We had different strategic objectives, and we mutually agreed to separate,” Withrow said.
As early as November, the Marine Corps is slated to downselect from a field of five to two vendors that will produce 16 vehicles during the engineering and manufacturing development phase. The other ACV competitors include: BAE Systems, which is offering a version of Iveco Defence’s Superav ; General Dynamics [GD], which has proposed its Light Armored Vehicle (LAV) 6; Science Applications International Corporation [SAIC], which has partnered with ST Kinetics to offer the latter’s Terrex vehicle; and Advanced Defense Vehicle Systems, or ADVS, based in Lake Orion, Mich.
The service is set to choose a single vendor for full-rate production in 2018. It plans to buy more than 200 ACV 1.1 vehicles to start replacing the amphibious assault vehicle.