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Like most everyone else involved in the Army’s ground vehicle industrial base, the prime contractors who at one point were working on the service’s Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program are waiting for the Army’s next move.
The service has promised to release about $50 million in funding that it had left over from the GCV in order to finance further concept development from the two competitors, BAE Systems and General Dynamics, which likely will receive about $20 million each, with another $10 million going to Army research laboratories for further in-house work.
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The Army is “working that bridge effort right now,” said Mark Signorelli, BAE Systems’ vice president of combat vehicles.
“The one specific item that they asked us to do is continue testing of the automotive test rig” that the company had developed for the GCV program to continue to test its performance and reliability, he said. In effect, what the Army is trying to do is “to characterize what are the options around a full modernization effort, and what are the options around future fighting vehicle [FFV].”
Part of the debate in the Army revolves around what to do with the Bradley fighting vehicle while it waits for the FFV to come along in 2019 to 2021.
The service has conducted several engineering change proposal (ECP) upgrades on the Bradley in recent years, and Signorelli said he doesn’t know if there will be another ECP round, or a full Bradley modernization effort that precedes an FFV capability.
“I think that given the timeline for FFV, which is a 2019-2021 program start, there is going to have to be an incremental upgrade for Bradley, and right now we’re in discussion with the Army around how extensive that upgrade would be,” he said. “Is it focused on maintaining current performance, or do they want to pursue new capabilities for Bradley? I think that’s the decision that the Army has got to make.”
If the Army sticks to its current schedule, then the two major Bradley upgrades are a variety of mobility enhancements that would include a new power pack, and possibly up-gunning to a 30mm or larger cannon, the company has said.
One reason that the Army pushed back the GCV program is that it was concerned about the vehicle’s weight. The service has said it is looking for leap-ahead technologies in the realm of armor and to drive down the vehicle’s weight.
Signorelli, however, said he isn’t so sure.
“I don’t think that there are going to be huge breakthroughs in armor technologies that are going to result in the kind of weight reduction that they’re expecting” he said. “It’s more of an incremental steady state improvement, and it’s the sum of a number of small improvements that give you an overall weight reduction.”
The service has looked at active protection systems, and “if the Army can convince itself that active protection systems can provide the full spectrum survivability solution” the service is looking for, then it may be one way to go. But “today active protection provides an improvement in survivability, but until its performance is demonstrated and validated, you’re not going to see it implemented as a major weight-reduction” solution, he added.
The company has also been in talks with the Army about keeping the Bradley turret line at its York, Pennsylvania, facility open once its work is complete at the end of fiscal year 2015.
Production on the line has already been humming at its minimum sustainment rate, even after BAE and the service worked out a deal last year to convert 150 Bradley cavalry vehicles into infantry fighting vehicles ahead of schedule to keep the line warm. Due to the lack of work, the company announced at the end of last year that it was laying off 135 York employees after previously closing its vehicle facility in Sealy, Texas. ■
