Tag: army-futures-command

  • Army moves ahead on plans to replace storied Bradley Fighting Vehicle

    Army moves ahead on plans to replace storied Bradley Fighting Vehicle

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    DETROIT ARSENAL, Michigan — Two industry teams competing to design a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle replacement have completed preliminary design reviews, clearing a hurdle ahead of the next milestone in 2025, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, Army program executive officer for ground combat systems, said.

    American Rheinmetall Vehicles and General Dynamics Land Systems were chosen from a pool of bidders in June 2023 to continue into a detailed design phase of the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle.

    Both teams are designing a hybrid vehicle featuring a suite of lethal capabilities to include a 50mm cannon, a remote turret, anti-tank guided missiles, machine guns employed through an advanced third-generation, forward-looking infrared sensor, an integrated protection suite, kitted armor, and signature management capabilities as well as intelligent fire control, according to Army officials.

    The total value of both contracts is approximately $1.6 billion; the overall program is expected to be worth about $45 billion, according to the Army.

    The last preliminary design review wrapped up in August, and the service will have a quick turnaround to complete critical design reviews in order to begin building physical prototypes, Dean said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week.

    RELATED
    In this image provided by U.S. Transportation Command, a stevedore sits in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle before loading it onto the ARC Wallenius Wilhemsen Jan. 25, 2023, at the Transportation Core Dock in North Charleston, S.C.

    “At that point [when] the design is final, all of the elements and parts are defined, and at that point the contractor is ordering all their material to build prototypes,” Dean said.

    Prototypes will take 18 to 20 months to construct after the critical design reviews wrap up. Once prototypes are delivered, the Army will move into a test and evaluation phase with both competitors before deciding on a winner in fiscal 2027. The first vehicles are expected to be fielded in fiscal 2029.

    The Army is moving on an aggressive schedule between completion of a preliminary design review and a critical design review, Dean said.

    Such a schedule is possible because of the designs taking place in a digital engineering environment and frequent soldier touch points in physical and virtual mockups, Col. Kevin Bradley, who is in charge of combat vehicle modernization within Army Futures Command, said in the same interview.

    “Having soldiers get in and actually see what the seating in the back looked like, how their evacuation drills would go, definitely was beneficial to both vendors in giving them feedback to help adjust designs to better suit what we were looking for in the requirements,” he said.

    “I would say we’ve had everything from small user interface changes up to, in one case, at least a fairly significant structural change to the base design,” Dean said. “There are some fairly dramatic shifts, and this is the time to do them.”

    American Rheinmetall Defense’s team includes Textron Systems, RTX, L3Harris Technologies and Allison Transmission as well as artificial intelligence-focused company Anduril Technologies.

    GDLS is teamed up with GM Defense; Applied Intuition, a specialist in modeling and simulating autonomy for the automobile industry; and AeroVironment, which is providing its Switchblade loitering munitions for integration into the design. GDLS also continues to work with General Dynamics Mission Systems to incorporate networks, radio gear and cyber capabilities.

    Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

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  • Army navigation drill to incorporate new sensors in coming years

    Army navigation drill to incorporate new sensors in coming years

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    The Army’s annual exercise focused on refining its Positioning, Navigation and Timing capabilities, called PNTAX, will widen its aperture in future years, the Army’s new All-Domain Sensing Cross Functional Team lead told Defense News.

    The new All-Domain Sensing CFT is now fully established, following the announcement in March it would become Army Futures Command’s latest office to focus on modernization efforts.

    The team, created to develop capabilities that will allow the service to understand battlespace goings-on, will initially work toward creating an architecture of sensors as well as processing and disseminating the enormous amount of data collected from those sensors.

    The team grew out of the former Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing/Space CFT and took its current staff and director, Michael Monteleone, and expanded the mission to focus on broad deep-sensing capabilities.

    “I think you’re going to see an evolution of PNTAX probably both in name and also in scope,” Monteleone told Defense News ahead of the U.S. Army’s annual conference. PNTAX stands for PNT Assessment Exercise.

    While he said he could not yet divulge details on exactly how the exercise would be evolving, Monteleone said: “It’ll be something different. As we go more and more towards the resilient architectures from space to ground, both in transport and in data, then also as we start augmenting our formations with the human-machine integrated side of it, as we bring more robots, more [unmanned aircraft systems] capability into that architecture, we have to evaluate that in that denied environment.”

    PNTAX will also likely be federated into other experiments and activities across the Army as well, Monteleone noted.

    The Army just wrapped up its sixth PNTAX at the end of last month. The experiment “continues to deliver more and more value,” Monteleone said, because it offers a realistic threat environment that is “unique.”

    There were were over 600 participants in the event, to include joint partners, combatant commands and all of the Five Eyes partners Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, Monteleone said. Over 150 technologies were assessed and over 130 organizations total were on the ground over the three-week evaluation.

    While the experimentation effort will evolve to encompass new focus areas within the All-Domain Sensing CFT, the team is not finished working on PNT capabilities even though it has seen successful fielding of a mounted and dismounted PNT system and the CFT has closed up shop.

    “There is still a lot of work to be done in PNT,” Monteleone said.

    “It’s really focused on what’s next in PNT and also focused on how to leverage exquisite PNT as a system of systems enabler to provide advantage,” he said. “Think of it from the perspective of being able to couple that with communications systems, electronic warfare systems, sensing systems and being able to outmaneuver adversaries, essentially, because I now have the ability to trust my timing source.”

    Jen Judson is an award-winning journalist covering land warfare for Defense News. She has also worked for Politico and Inside Defense. She holds a Master of Science degree in journalism from Boston University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Kenyon College.

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