Tag: association-of-the-u-s-army

Army eyes autonomous missile launcher and 1,000-kilometer strikes

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Update: This article has been revised to include the scheduled start of increment 5 for the Precision Strike Missile.

The Army’s next step in expanding the distance and survivability of its land-based rockets could see a missile delivered from an autonomous launcher to strike targets farther than 1,000 kilometers away.

On Tuesday, Maj. Gen. Winston Brooks, commander of the Fires Center of Excellence at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, and Brig. Gen. Rory Crooks, director of the Cross Functional Team-Long Range Precision Fires, discussed future work on “Increment 5″ of the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM.

If successful, the project would give even low-level tactical units the ability to conduct what are known as “strategic deep fires,” which range beyond 500 kilometers, according to Army data.

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Defense News reported that in November the Army conducted its first two PrSM salvo tests at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. The testing involved firing the two missiles in rapid succession.

Testers used the M142 High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS, launcher.

In his remarks Tuesday, Crooks cautioned that while there is much potential for developing the fires platform with the autonomous launcher, there isn’t yet a timeline for fully developing and fielding that technology.

But the missile is slated to enter its science and technology phase in October 2025.

Currently, the missile is limited by its platform. The M270 Multiple Launch Rocket System, or MLRS pod, is 13 feet long.

Crooks noted that because the autonomous platform doesn’t need a cab for a human driver, there could be a chance to put a longer missile on the frame at some point.

The PrSM program seeks to replace legacy systems such as the MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile System, the same weapon used by Ukrainian forces for the first time in October 2023 to strike Russian targets.

The U.S. missiles used by Ukrainians had shorter maximum distances than those used by the U.S. Army, limiting them to less than 300 kilometers, Military Times previously reported. The same system has been used more recently for deeper strikes into Russian territory.

The Increment 1 versions of the PrSM are being fielded now by Lockheed Martin. Those missiles have a range of at least 500 kilometers, according to the company.

Increment 2 is a land-based, anti-ship seeker; Increment 3 will add lethal payload options; and the Increment 4 project is seeking to push existing ranges beyond 1,000 kilometers.

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

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12/04/2024
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.

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“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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10/17/2024
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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10/16/2024
How the Army is improving care in the field to keep soldiers alive

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The Army is revamping how it provides lifesaving care in the field, including new hospital setup gear, ways to preserve blood on the front lines and a new combat-ready respirator to keep wounded soldiers breathing.

Over the past year, Program Executive Office-Soldier added medical devices to its portfolio of all things soldier, which includes clothing, weapons, body armor and a host of other items.

The 1945th Medical Detachment is slated to stand up in late 2025 and will hold three Prolonged Care Augmentation Detachments, or PCADs, officials said.

Early work on the PCADs began as all U.S. service branches acknowledged that large-scale combat operations would mean wounded soldiers might have to wait longer for care. The commonly referred to “golden hour” of getting a wounded individual to higher-level medical care now might look more like the “golden day.”

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“We got spoiled in [the Global War on Terror] where nobody was more than an hour away from a surgeon,” said Sgt. 1st Class Andrew Proctor, senior enlisted advisor for Project Manager Soldier Medical Devices.

That means medical personnel from field surgeons to medics will need to keep soldiers alive longer with what they have on hand as compared to flying them off the battlefield for care at a full-fledged hospital.

A model of the Army’s Prolonged Care Augmentation Detachments, or PCADs. The PCAD concept allows commanders to expand or shrink the footprint of their field hospitals. (U.S. Army)

With PCADs, the aim is to push more advanced care options, training and equipment down lower in the chain of care.

Army medical personnel put care into three main categories: Roles I, II and III.

Role I care covers treatment between the time a soldier is injured to when the soldier arrives at a forward aid station — combat medics keeping a soldier stable, for example.

Role II care is typically delivered by an area support medical company — usually part of the soldier’s higher command. This is the first time during the chain of care that a soldier might receive surgery.

Meanwhile, Role III care is a full field hospital, formerly called a combat support hospital. The PCAD concept allows commanders to expand or shrink the footprint of their field hospitals.

The “modular” setup of the detachments allows them to start with as few as 32 hospital beds and expand up to 248 beds, said Maj. Felicia Williams, a nurse consultant for the assistant program manager of hospitalization.

“This allows commanders to make decision on how large of a footprint do I need,” Proctor said.

Another piece of gear that will ease the strain on critical care is the 2.6-pound Sparrow Respirator. The respirator keeps a patient breathing instead of tying up an individual while manually using a pump to inflate the patient’s lungs. The service plans to field 6,900 respirators beginning in mid-2025.

“That’s a huge win for us, anybody who’s had to sit there and squeeze a bag for hours will tell you patient care has improved,” Proctor said.

The service is also working on new blood storage refrigerators for the field. The devices it’s now testing can hold up to 40 standard bags of blood and keep it viable for up to 78 hours, officials said.

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

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10/16/2024
New microgrid standard aims to rein in expeditionary-power vendors

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The Army is pushing to assert its new standard for connecting battlefield power systems, creating expeditionary microgrids without the constraint of vendor-specific components, according to service officials in the Program Executive Office for Combat Support and Combat Service Support.

“We were seeing a lot of these power systems emerge that were different pieces of a microgrid, but right now, all of the microgrids that are out there use proprietary interfaces to talk,” Cory Goetz, who is the technical management division chief for the Army’s Expeditionary and Sustainment Systems program manager’s office, told Defense News shortly before the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

In order to develop the capability to get all of these systems to communicate, Goetz said, the Army decided to develop what it calls the Tactical Microgrid Standard, or TMS, in partnership with industry.

The standard was published officially in 2023, allowing for an open architecture for competitive procurement of power systems that can tie into an expeditionary microgrid architecture, Goetz explained.

“It allows us not to have to pure-fleet everything in the Department of Defense with tactical power. If someone has a good system, say it’s an energy storage system, if they make it with TMS, we can incorporate it into what we do after, of course, verifying it’s compliant,” he added.

The standards initiative is the basis of an effort called the Small Tactical Expeditionary Power, or STEP, project, which consists of small systems with hybrid capability that soldiers can operate quietly, toggling between fuel-burning energy production and batteries, Goetz said.

Then the Army is working on a Universal Power Gateway capability on the TMS basis. Its idea is to tie any power source or power storage capability into the service’s Advanced Medium Mobile Power Source (AMMPS) generator, made by Cummins.

“The UPG, that’s an emerging requirement that we see pointing to a program of record,” Goetz said. “It allows us to tie into those vehicles that will be exporting power in the future, and then be able to hybridize our generators for resilience and efficiency.”

As result, hybrid-electric vehicles would become nodes bundling what are now individual power connections to generators.

The program office is also working to push the microgrid standard to industry “in a more wholesale way, in a more organized way,” Goetz said.

Officials have created a user group, currently counting 40 companies, that they hope will draw relevant companies into a conversation of adopting and advancing the standard.

The program office hopes to field the STEP capability in fiscal year 2028, with the UPG initiative following a year later, though early variants of either project could be ready sooner.

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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10/16/2024
US Army Pacific to absorb new units under ‘transformation’ mantra

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The U.S. Army command for the Indo-Pacific finds itself at the front of the service’s transformation initiative, incorporating new unit types created to facilitate rapid adaptation to adversary tactics, according to U.S. Army Pacific Command chief Gen. Charles Flynn.

Several units in the Pacific, from Hawaii to Alaska, were chosen as part of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s initiative, dubbed “Transforming in Contact,” Flynn said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

“But there’s a whole other transformation in contact that’s going on out here at the operational and theater level.”

That transformation has to do with absorbing new organizations and capabilities designed to facilitate the quick incorporation of new tactics and technologies in the field.

“In my view, that is where the connective tissue occurs between tactical forces and operational and strategic forces that exist in the joint world,” Flynn said.

For example, the Army in the Pacific is the first to get a Theater Information Advantage Detachment, Flynn said. The TIAD is meant to keep its finger on the pulse of how adversarial nations like China and Russia are conducting information warfare.

The service has deployed a Security Force Assistance Brigade, a Theater Fires Element and the TIAD into areas near China, Flynn added.

The Army has already created two of three Multidomain Task Forces in the Pacific theater, which have been heavily involved in exercises throughout 2024.

The service is planning to build five MDTFs total. Another is based in Europe, while one more will be based at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, and designed to align with global rapid responses.

The units will operate across all domains — land, air, sea, space and cyberspace — and are equipped with the Army’s growing capabilities, including long-range precision fires.

The MDTFs will take on game-changing capabilities like the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, the Mid-Range Capability missile system and the delayed Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon as part of a Long-Range Fires Battalion.

The Army in June fired two PrSM missiles in Palau as part of a ship sinking exercise during Valiant Shield. The service also deployed the MRC missile to the Philippines during the Balikatan exercise in May. The MRC missile system, for the time being, will remain in the Philippines, Flynn said.

The Pacific Army has also established a Theater Strike Effects Group, Flynn added.

“This theater-level Army space formation is integral for today’s battlefield,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, then the head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said in January. “It will allow us to leverage the experience of its command team and staff to ensure success at every echelon, ensuring that all our capabilities are being employed when and where they’re needed best.”

The group will coordinate with the MDTFs that will use Army space interdiction forces with cyber and electronic warfare capabilities to block adversary defenses, according to the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.

As it works through the deployment of these major new capabilities like long-range precision fires, it’s imperative, Flynn said, that the Army is organized properly at the theater level in order to effectively coordinate the right engagement authorities.

“This extra capacity at the Theater Army level is transformational and its organizational changes are in front of the arrival of new technologies, new capabilities and new platforms,” he said. “It’s tailored to the region.”

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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10/12/2024
US Army Pacific to absorb new units under ‘transformation’ mantra

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The U.S. Army command for the Indo-Pacific finds itself at the front of the service’s transformation initiative, incorporating new unit types created to facilitate rapid adaptation to adversary tactics, according to U.S. Army Pacific Command chief Gen. Charles Flynn.

Several units in the Pacific, from Hawaii to Alaska, were chosen as part of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George’s initiative, dubbed “Transforming in Contact,” Flynn said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

“But there’s a whole other transformation in contact that’s going on out here at the operational and theater level.”

That transformation has to do with absorbing new organizations and capabilities designed to facilitate the quick incorporation of new tactics and technologies in the field.

“In my view, that is where the connective tissue occurs between tactical forces and operational and strategic forces that exist in the joint world,” Flynn said.

For example, the Army in the Pacific is the first to get a Theater Information Advantage Detachment, Flynn said. The TIAD is meant to keep its finger on the pulse of how adversarial nations like China and Russia are conducting information warfare.

The service has deployed a Security Force Assistance Brigade, a Theater Fires Element and the TIAD into areas near China, Flynn added.

The Army has already created two of three Multidomain Task Forces in the Pacific theater, which have been heavily involved in exercises throughout 2024.

The service is planning to build five MDTFs total. Another is based in Europe, while one more will be based at Fort Liberty, North Carolina, and designed to align with global rapid responses.

The units will operate across all domains — land, air, sea, space and cyberspace — and are equipped with the Army’s growing capabilities, including long-range precision fires.

The MDTFs will take on game-changing capabilities like the Precision Strike Missile, or PrSM, the Mid-Range Capability missile system and the delayed Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon as part of a Long-Range Fires Battalion.

The Army in June fired two PrSM missiles in Palau as part of a ship sinking exercise during Valiant Shield. The service also deployed the MRC missile to the Philippines during the Balikatan exercise in May. The MRC missile system, for the time being, will remain in the Philippines, Flynn said.

The Pacific Army has also established a Theater Strike Effects Group, Flynn added.

“This theater-level Army space formation is integral for today’s battlefield,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, then the head of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said in January. “It will allow us to leverage the experience of its command team and staff to ensure success at every echelon, ensuring that all our capabilities are being employed when and where they’re needed best.”

The group will coordinate with the MDTFs that will use Army space interdiction forces with cyber and electronic warfare capabilities to block adversary defenses, according to the Army’s Space and Missile Defense Command.

As it works through the deployment of these major new capabilities like long-range precision fires, it’s imperative, Flynn said, that the Army is organized properly at the theater level in order to effectively coordinate the right engagement authorities.

“This extra capacity at the Theater Army level is transformational and its organizational changes are in front of the arrival of new technologies, new capabilities and new platforms,” he said. “It’s tailored to the region.”

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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10/12/2024