The service has been working to mount Javelins on the Stryker along with a 30mm cannon as part of a joint urgent operational need from the European theater.

The Stryker Infantry Combat Vehicle Dragoon was evaluated by the 2nd Cavalry Regiment in Germany and the Army subsequently decided to field 30mm cannons on more of its Stryker vehicles going forward. The service initiated a competition earlier this year to come up with designs to integrate the gun onto the vehicle.

The Army incorporated a Javelin capability into the Stryker, but it required the vehicle to stop and the operator to get out and fire the system and climb back into the vehicle. There is also a version that uses the Common Remote Weapons Station (CROWS) in operation by the 2nd Cavalry.

While the Army expected to complete the integration of the Javelin system on the Stryker using RWS later this year, it has delayed the effort by over a year.

Integrating Javelin and the remote weapon stations has “a specific set of constraints for this vehicle,” Venable told Defense News in an interview at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference.

The service is taking the highly-capable and long-fielded Javelin and integrating it onto a remote weapons station that is also fielded. The RWS system is actually being taken from the flat-bottom Stryker fleet and being upgraded to accommodate the weapon.

“We have some technical risk that we’re managing. I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to slip fielding from this summer,” Venable said. “Because of the technical risk encountered in this latest test cycle, we’re going to have to slip the fielding cycle.”

The issues cropped up in the Army’s early user assessment three weeks ago, he said.

The technical difficulties have been fixed, Venable said, but the system has to get back into the test cycle and move through a materiel release approval process to get to fielding, Venable said.

“Other than that, I think the capability itself works great, the technical risk wasn’t associated with and we validated our functionality of the system,” he added. “It’s just marrying up the two, getting them to talk to each other and the fire control stations down below in the hull.”

Getting all of that integrated into a new suite of computing and presentation capabilities has “been technically challenging for the team,” Venable said.

The plan now is to field the capability to the 2nd Cavalry next summer and then to the 1-2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Washington, the following summer.

WASHINGTON — Sikorsky and Boeing have provided the first video of the SB>1 Defiant helicopter, one of two designs competing in the Army’s Joint Multi-Role technology demonstrator program, showing a ground run at a company facility in Florida.

That program is designed to inform the requirements for the Future Vertical Lift family of systems, set to enter service in the 2030s.

The first flight of the aircraft has been long-awaited, and in late 2018, the two companies confirmed it would be delayed until 2019. According to a statement released with the video, the ground run moves it closer to taking to the skies.

The unconventional rotor system used on the aircraft is based on Sikorsky’s X2 technology, and according to the development team, offers advanced agility and maneuverability.

The Defiant’s competitor is Bell’s V-280 Valor tilt-rotor, which has been flying since late 2017.

Maj. Gen. Stephen Farmen, commander at U.S. Army Security Assistance Command, told Defense News that he plans to “double down and put emphasis on sustainment” when talking with partners abroad, beginning the discussions early enough to potentially change how allies invest their dollars.

“As I’ve traveled the globe, what I’ve noticed is countries tend to under invest in sustainment. That creates a whole host of problems,” he told Defense News in an Oct. 11 interview. “What we don’t want is for Apaches or Black Hawks to turn into bird nests in five years or a paperweight, and the only way that we can fix that is by making sure we’re having good, candid conversations up front.”

“In other words, you may think you need 20 Black Hawks, but if you buy 18 then you can buy the sustainment for the next 10-15 years,” he continued. “So we’re trying to have these meaningful discussion early.”

The U.S. pushing allies to focus on upkeep of existing goods, rather that getting “enamored with chasing the shiny object,” as Farman put it, is nothing new. And the fact that American equipment comes with a long tail of sustainment and training is a traditional selling point Pentagon and State officials use when discussing potential weapon sales abroad.

But Farmen says his office now has a system in place where “we can see the kind of sustainment we’re providing to every country, we can see the sustainment profile for every country, which is going to allow us to then have the dialogue with them to show them ‘this is what you look like, this is what you bought into, this is the performance level, or this is where you need to contribute more.’”

Part of that pitch involves arguing that sustainment isn’t just about maintaining what you have, but opening up future opportunities. Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis has emphasized increasing lethality for existing systems. The argument is such that as those capabilities come online, the better maintained your equipment is, the better chance you have to load new technologies onto an older platform.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure you have a sustainment portfolio in place that goes out 10, 15, 20 years,” he said. “If we can get them investing in sustainment right, I think that is going to take it to the next level.”