The Army needs to build new combat vehicles that integrate current and future technologies if it wants to regain the technological overmatch it may have already lost against peer competitors, said Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, director of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s Army Capabilities Integration Center.
“We are gravely underinvested in close combat overmatch, in combat vehicles,” McMaster said on Tuesday at a one-day conference on Army platforms hosted by the Association of the U.S. Army at its headquarters outside Washington, D.C.
“We have to make a clear, compelling argument for these capabilities. Modern combat vehicles enable joint-force freedom of movement and action, pose our enemies with multiple dilemmas, and will be increasingly capable in the future.”
Photo: General Dynamics
The Army has no combat vehicle in development, a first since World War I, McMaster said. It does have upgrade and service-life extension programs underway for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and M1 Abrams tank that include technologies like 3rd-generation forward looking infrared (FLIR) sensors.
The closest thing to a new-start combat vehicle program is the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV that will replace the M113 troop transport. McMaster called for acceleration of AMPV, which is being built by BAE Systems. Also in the pipeline is the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), a replacement for a portion of the Humvee fleet and the light reconnaissance vehicle (LRV), which will be an up-gunned version of the JLTV.
Another program that seeks a medium combat vehicle with offensive firepower for infantry brigades is set to begin soon. The Army adopted an aggressive timeline for what it calls the Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) capability that will likely be in the realm of a light-to-medium tracked vehicle armed with a 105mm or 120mm cannon.
Stryker wheeled combat vehicles are being retrofitted with remote turrets topped with 30mm cannons to fulfill a intermediate offensive gap between the LRV and MPF, which will then bridge the lethality and weight spectrum from tactical wheeled vehicles to the Bradley and Abrams.
While the Army focuses on sustaining its current fleets, potential enemies have not sat idly by and have fielded armored vehicles equipped with active protection systems, electronic warfare suites and other mature technologies the Army is only beginning to experiment with, McMaster said.
“Our enemies have not remained static,” he said. “As we have maintained the combat vehicles we have – we’ve improved them obviously, but they’re the same ones – our enemies have been improving their capability integrating new technologies into their vehicles. We see it in allies and friends, as well.”
Mature combat vehicle automotive, protection and lethality tech has seen dramatic improvement since the introduction of the Army’s combat vehicles and upgrades are mature and readily available, McMaster said. The problem is existing vehicles like the Bradley and Abrams have no room for systems that require more space, power and weight, he said.
“We are at the point where we have maxed them out,” he said. “I think we all have to agree that we can no longer get out of our existing combat vehicles what we’re going to need in the foreseeable future.”
The Israeli Merkava Mark IV tank is in many ways superior to the M1 Abrams, he added. McMaster also mentioned the German Puma infantry fighting vehicle, the Swedish CV90 and the British Ajax as vehicles with integrated technologies that surpass some U.S. Army capabilities.
“There are technologies that exist at a high level of maturity that can be integrated into combat vehicles and we just get to them because we don’t have a program to do it,” McMaster said. “Opportunities exist to integrate existing technologies into a new-build combat vehicle through “an imaginative engineering concept that will give us back the kind of close-combat overmatch we need today and in the future.”
McMaster dismissed criticisms that combat vehicles are relics of the Cold War and that they are too expensive and take too long to build. Vehicles are useful in complex terrain and in urban environments where they “allow you to take more risk, to get closer to that enemy in a protected platform and then overmatch with precision firepower that turns the enemy into smoking boots but protects innocent civilians in that area,” he said.
Arguing that vehicles take too long to build is a self-fulling, self-defeating mantra because “if you never start, it takes a really, really, really long time,” he said. “If it takes a long time, let’s start now.”
The Army has long suffered the ignominious cancellation of Future Combat Systems that aimed to develop a family of vehicles and networked systems that ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own outsized requirements. The revived Ground Combat Vehicle also amounted to nothing after much outlay of time and funding.
McMaster said neither was no reason not to try again. As for the notion that combat vehicles are prohibitively expensive, McMaster took a swipe at the other military services, both of which have some high-profile money pits programs of their own.
“Expensive? Compared to what? Is it expensive compared to a nuclear submarine? An F-35? An F-22?” he said. “Actually, this is inexpensive capability that is vital to our national security and defense. When you compare it to the big-ticket procurement of other services, the Army is a cheap date.”