Congress cut $34 million to the FARA program, but it remains unclear why that cut was made. The Army said at the time that the cut would affect its ability to provide some government-furnished equipment to competitors that will be chosen to build and fly prototype aircraft as part of the effort. The Army had planned to provide the service’s new Improved Turbine Engine Program engine, a 20mm gun, an integrated munitions launcher and its modular open-systems architecture.

Brig. Gen. Wally Rugen, who is in charge of Army future vertical lift modernization efforts, said in January that the service would try to find creative ways to absorb the cut, but it might include having to pull back a bit on using government-furnished equipment.

The service chose two teams — Lockheed Martin-owned Sikorsky and Bell — to build prototypes for the FARA competition on March 25.

“We were taking risk in the GFE based on the funding cuts that we took,” Dan Bailey, the Army’s FARA competitive prototyping program manager within the Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation and Missile Center, told a group of reporters via teleconference March 26.

But based on the two competitors downselected out of a pool of five designs, the Army was able to recoup some funds, “not fully re-fund that into GFE, but get GFE back to a reasonable risk point for FY20,” Bailey said.

All five companies designing possible prototypes over the past year were given contracts that would have fully funded each through the building and flight testing of the prototypes. The contracts were designed to basically turn off the funding spigot for those not chosen to continue in the competition.

“Fundamentally, we’re able to do the full scope that we were planning to do,” Bailey said. “Even though we took the cut, our decisions and where we’re at postured with these two performers have put us back on full scope really, at a lower cost value for this year.”

The Army was able to call back providing the 20mm cannon, the integrated munitions launcher and the modular open-systems architecture — “so that is the FVL ecosystem risk reduction that we really want to hone in on, so again, not just focused on the air vehicle, but focused on the weapon systems,” Rugen said on the same call with reporters.

While the two companies that were picked did help the service make up for the congressional cut to the program, it was not the reason they were selected.

“The two that we picked were deemed as most advantageous overall for the government,” Bailey said, “and so that really was the metric.”

Underneath that, the Army looked at each aircraft’s ability to meet the mission, the designs’ maturity, and how well they were postured to meet the schedule laid out, transition into a final integration qualification phase, and then into production, Bailey said.

The prototype aircraft are expected to start flying in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, and the flight test is expected to run through 2023. The engineering and manufacturing development phase is expected to begin in FY24.

The Army is planning to procure both a FARA and Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft (FLRAA) that will slowly replace the current fleet of Sikorsky-manufactured UH-60 Black Hawks utility helicopters and Boeing-made AH-64 Apache attack helicopters. The service plans to initially field both in the 2030s.

FARA will fill a critical capability gap currently being filled by AH-64E Apache attack helicopters teamed with Shadow unmanned aircraft following the retirement of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopters.

The service has tried and failed three times to fill the gap with an aircraft.

The Army had selected five teams to provide FARA designs last spring: AVX Aircraft Co. partnered with L-3 Communications Integrated Systems, Bell, Boeing, Karem Aircraft and Sikorsky.

The Army laid out a handful of mandatory requirements that the vendors had to meet and also a list of desired requirements for initial designs, Col. Craig Alia, the Future Vertical Lift Cross Functional Team chief of staff, told reporters last year.

The service also looked at the vendors’ execution plans and evaluated timing as well as funding profile requirements.

“The ones that were selected were clearly meeting the mandatory requirements and were in the acceptable risk level of the execution plan and the desired requirements,” Dan Bailey, who is the FARA competitive prototype program manager, added. The prototype program falls under the purview of the Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Aviation and Missile Center’s Aviation Development Directorate.

Lockheed unveiled its design — Raider X — at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in October 2019. The company’s design uses its Raider X2 coaxial technology with a focus on how it will perform “at the X.”

“One thing that always comes out is the importance of this aircraft at the X,” Tim Malia, Sikorsky’s director of future vertical lift light, told Defense News in an interview last fall. “The ‘X’ is defined by the Army as the terminal area where they actually have to go do the work, do the reconnaissance, do the attack mission. The operation at the X is really critical for this program and for this platform.”

That’s where Raider X comes in. It’s a slightly larger version of the Raider coaxial helicopter that Lockheed has been flying for several years at its West Palm Beach, Florida, flight test center.

“Through our mature S-97 RAIDER technology demonstrator, we continue to optimize our FARA solution, which will provide the Army with an integrated weapon system that combines speed, range, maneuverability, survivability and operational flexibility,” Andy Adams, Sikorsky’s vice president of future vertical lift, said in a March 25 statement. This approach is driving down risk and will result in an aircraft solution that is capable of executing the Army’s joint all-domain operations.”

Bell revealed its design — the Bell 360 Invictus — which is based on 525 technology. But its design features several key differences, including its size in order to adhere to the Army requirement of 40-foot in diameter rotor blades.

The design includes a single main rotor helicopter in a four-blade configuration, a low-drag tandem cockpit fuselage and transportability in a C-17.

“Bell is proud to continue work on the Bell 360 Invictus as part of the Army’s Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft Competitive Prototype competition,” Keith Flail, Bell’s vice president of advanced vertical lift systems, told Defense News on March 25.

“We have made significant investment and begun manufacturing in order to preserve the Army’s schedule for FARA CP and we are thrilled to continue our work on the Invictus,” he said. “Bell’s approach from the beginning has been tailored to deliver the advanced performance required without excessive complexity in order to get critical capability in the hands of the warfighter quickly and affordably.”

The AVX and L3 team was the earliest to unveil its design for the FARA competition at the Army Aviation Association of America’s annual summit in Nashville, Tennessee, in April 2019. The design uses AVX’s compound coaxial and ducted fans technology. The companies said its single-engine design meets 100 percent of the Army’s mandatory requirements and 70 percent of its desired attributes.

Karem announced it would team with Northrop and Raytheon and came out with its design at AUSA — its AR-40 — with a single main rotor, tilting compound wings and a rotating tail rotor.

Boeing was the last to reveal its design, coming out with it March 3. The company’s clean-sheet design featured a hingeless, six-bladed, high-solidity main rotor; a four-bladed conventional tail rotor; and a propeller on the back.

The prototype aircraft are expected to start flying in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2022, and the flight test is expected to run through 2023. The engineering and manufacturing development phase is expect to begin in FY24.

WASHINGTON — In what was described as a mutual decision, Raytheon is exiting from the Army’s Precision Strike Missile technology maturation and risk reduction phase without a flight test under its belt, according to a company statement sent to Defense News on March 25.

“Although we remain confident in our resolution to the technical issue that delayed our DeepStrike flight test, the Army and Raytheon have mutually come to the decision to conclude our participation in the PrSM Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction phase,” the statement reads in full.

DeepStrike is the name Raytheon gave its missile meant to replace the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), which is built by PrSM competitor Lockheed Martin.

“The decision was made to not provide additional money to Raytheon to help them try to meet the requirements to get into the next phase of the competition and, really, that meant have a successful flight test,” Brig. Gen. John Rafferty, who is in charge of Army Long-Range Precision Fires modernization, told Defense News in a March 25 interview.

“Their period of performance ended on the 20th, last Friday, and so they dropped out of the competition because they didn’t meet the requirement for the next phase,” he said. “It has been a competitive program and all competitions end and this one ended in this way.”

Lockheed now has two successful test flights of its PrSM offering, but Raytheon had struggled with a technical issue since late last year when it was scheduled to execute its first test flight at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico.

The company’s next flight test will be held April 30th, Rafferty said.

Replacing ATACMS with a new long-range precision missile is a top priority for the Army within its modernization portfolio because it is the centerpiece to how the service plans to operate against adversaries in the future where standoff will need to be greater.

While Raytheon may be out now, Rafferty said, “I think it’s important to remember that we view not just the base missile as the competitive part of PrSM.”

The Army intends to spiral in capability to the base missile later on. Spiral one adds a more capable seeker, and spiral two would enhance lethality of the weapon either through sub-munitions or “a couple of alternatives that we are considering for that,” Rafferty said.

And the service plans to extend the range of the PrSM missile so there are opportunities for competition there “and we would welcome Raytheon as an important competitor,” Rafferty said, adding Raytheon’s design features a compelling propulsion system, which fundamentally differs from Lockheed’s design and could be considered down the road.

The service has accelerated PrSM’s fielding timeline by several years and will stick to the baseline requirements for the missile to get there. The Army has a goal to initially field PrSM in 2023.

The missile’s current maximum range requirement is 499 kilometers, which is the range that was compliant under the now-collapsed Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the United States and Russia. The United States withdrew from the treaty in August, and so the Army no longer has to adhere to the range limit for its missiles.

But the Army believes the baseline missile could actually reach a range of 550 kilometers based on data from both Raytheon and Lockheed. The Army has said it wouldn’t consider adjusting its requirements until each company has had a chance to see how their respective missile behaves in real flight tests.

Lockheed’s third flight will test the missile’s performance at an even shorter range. The company is waiting on a potential award to conduct three more flights tests in a second phase of the program. Those tests will include a maximum range test as well as a salvo firing of two missiles.

The Army selected a Stryker combat vehicle-based system that included a mission equipment package designed by Leonardo DRS. That mission equipment package includes Raytheon’s Stinger vehicle missile launcher.

The Army has been racing to bring an interim SHORAD capability to fruition since the service identified a capability gap in the European theater in 2016. The service received a directed requirement to build an IM-SHORAD system in February 2018.

The service went through a selection process that included a shoot-off at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, to determine the best collection of vendors to build nine prototypes.

The developmental testing includes just five prototypes, Worshim told Defense News in a recent interview. The vehicles are spread out across different installations to undergo a variety of tests and safety certification procedures.

One prototype is located at White Sands Missile Range undergoing weapons safety testing. Another two are going through automotive and road safety testing as well as some weapon safety testing at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland. Another one is located at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, undergoing cyber and electromagnetic spectrum testing.

The fifth prototype remains with lead integrator and Stryker-manufacturer General Dynamics Land Systems, where logistics and technical manual validation is ongoing, Worshim said.

The developmental testing will wrap up in June, he added.

Through testing, “we are learning some things, which testing is all about,” he said. “We’re seeing where we will have to have some corrective actions put in place as we move forward into more operational testing.”

While he would not detail the corrective actions, Worshim emphasized they are not improvements, is “nothing that can’t be overcome in a short period of time” and “nothing that is so far out of the box that we have to go back to the drawing board.”

Needing corrective actions, he said, is expected given the accelerated timeline for the program.

The Army expects to receive safety releases, which will allow soldiers to drive and operate the vehicles, he said, adding that soldiers have been involved since the beginning of the process to provide input but have yet to get inside and put the entire system to the test.

The service anticipates beginning operational testing in the fall, likely in September, which will last roughly two months, Worshim said. Should everything go well, additional procurement of the vehicles will move forward, he noted.

If the solution meets requirements, production efforts to build 144 systems — a total of four battalions — will move forward, depending on funding.

While the original plan was to rapidly field the IM-SHORAD systems to Europe in response to the capability gap there, Worshim explained, “there are multiple options of where the vehicles or the capability would be sent. At this time, I know the Army is reassessing where the greatest need for these vehicles are.”

The Army intends to use SHORAD as part of a layered air and missile defense architecture to include Indirect Fire Protection Capability, which defends against rockets, artillery and mortars as well as unmanned aircraft systems and cruise missiles. Other parts of that layer include systems aimed to protect against regional ballistic missile threats like Patriot and the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system.

With recent Iranian attacks on U.S. installations in Iraq, some have pushed to also see a SHORAD capability in that theater.

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon made good on its word that it would test a hypersonic glide body in a flight test this year, launching it from the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii, on March 19 at 10:30 p.m. local time.

The test was deemed a success.

The Common-Hypersonic Glide Body, or C-HGB, launched and flew at hypersonic speed to “a designated impact point,” according to a statement issued March 20 by the Department of Defense. The test was a joint effort between the Navy and Army.

Hypersonic weapons are capable of flying faster than the speed of sound — Mach 5 — and can maneuver between varying altitudes and azimuths, making it harder to detect.

The DoD has been jointly developing the C-HGB that will serve as the base of its offensive hypersonic missile. The test marks a major step forward in accomplishing that mission amid mounting criticism that the United States is behind China and Russia in hypersonic weapons development.

The C-HGB will be made up of the weapon’s warhead, guidance system, cabling and thermal protection shield. Each service will use the C-HGB as the base while developing individual weapon systems such as launchers capable of firing the weapons from land or sea.

The Missile Defense Agency monitored the test and gathered tracking data to help inform system development and design of a defensive hypersonic weapon — a ongoing effort within the agency — the statement noted.

Hypersonic weapons development is one of the DoD’s highest development priorities, and it is aiming to field a hypersonic weapon in the early to mid-2020s.

“This test builds on the success we had with Flight Experiment 1 in October 2017, in which our C-HGB achieved sustained hypersonic glide at our target distances,” said Vice Adm. Johnny Wolfe, the Navy’s director of Strategic Systems Programs. His outfit is leading the design of the C-HGB.

“In this test we put additional stresses on the system and it was able to handle them all, due to the phenomenal expertise of our top notch team of individuals from across government, industry and academia,” he said. “Today we validated our design and are now ready to move to the next phase towards fielding a hypersonic strike capability.”

While the Navy has led the C-HGB’s design and development, the Army is leading its production development. There is no hypersonic weapon industrial base in the U.S., so the service is leading the charge with the defense industry to start it from the ground up. Industry has, however, developed warheads, glide bodies and other components.

One of the biggest challenges is the pace at which the services want to test and field a hypersonic offensive capability. The Army wants a mobile land-based capability fielded around 2023. That means the service will likely choose manufacturers to build hypersonic missiles in a year or two.

The Navy wants its ship-launched capability fielded in 2023 followed by a submarine-launched missile in 2024, and the Air Force wants to field its air-launched version in 2022.

With major economic centers on both U.S. coasts restricting public gatherings, and with most of the country attempting social distancing to avoid the spread of the virus, industry as of this week appeared to still be sorting out how it would handle its own workforce and keep employees safe from infection.

Much of what the Army is doing to address its top modernization priorities depends on industry collaboration and efforts.

“We’re watching what is happening,” McConville said. “We do have some high-priority tests that we think are continuing to go, and industry is doing the same thing that we’re doing — they’re putting measures in place with their people. They’re weighing risks to the force and, really, risk to their missions as they do that.”

Some high-priority tests will continue, he said, while “other ones will slow down.”

While he did not list all high-priority tests that would likely go on, McConville noted that the Army is still moving forward with contract awards and making progress where it can. He pointed to the service’s recent contract awards to Bell and Sikorsky to continue to develop and test aircraft for the Army’s Future Long Range Assault Aircraft program.

That contract was awarded on the expected timeline.

The Army also tested its Extended Long-Range Cannon Artillery system at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona, on March 6, but that was only as uncertainty was just beginning to build in the U.S. regarding the spread of COVID-19.

The service has an abundance of important milestones planned across its modernization priorities this year, to include a robust flight test program for the Precision Strike Missile at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and a likely imminent flight test of a jointly developed hypersonic glide body.

The Army also plans to award contracts to build Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft prototypes this month.

But it’s unclear how other programs will move forward.

The previously troubled Integrated Battle Command System for air and missile defense is finally slated to go into a limited-user test in May this year, which is critical to the program’s success.

The Army planned to conduct a series of industry days to restart its effort to competitively procure a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle replacement, but according to sources, a virtual industry day to kick things off has been postponed and the Army plans to post informational slides to industry on Beta.Sam.Gov in the near term instead.

“The acquisition cycle continues to move on,” McConville said, “and we’ll have a better idea over the next 30 to 60 days, as more measures are implemented in certain states, what and how that really plays out.”

Defender Europe was slated to be the third-largest military exercise on the continent since the Cold War and was meant to test the Army’s ability to deliver a force from forts to ports in the United States and onward to ports in Europe, and from there to operational areas throughout Europe from Germany to Poland to the Baltic states and other Eastern European nations, Nordic countries and even Georgia.

The Army began to move troops and equipment into Europe beginning in January, with the meat of the exercise occurring in April and May this year.

But as COVID-19 has spread across the globe, with Europe designated as the newest epicenter of the virus, the Army decided last week that it would scale back Defender Europe, according to a statement from U.S. Army Europe.

“We have modified exercise Defender Europe 20 in size and scope,” a March 16 statement read. “As of March 13, all movement of personnel and equipment from the United States to Europe has ceased. The health, safety and readiness of our military, civilians and family members is our primary concern.”

The Army decided to cancel linked exercises that would have been a part of Defender Europe, which already happen on a regular basis in Europe, to include Dynamic Front, the Army Joint Warfighting Assessment, Saber Strike and Swift Response.

The service said it anticipates the armored brigade combat team already deployed to Europe will conduct gunnery and other combined training events with allies and partners as part of a modified exercise, and that forces already deployed to Europe for other “linked exercises” would come back to the U.S.

Also last week, U.S. Army Europe announced that its commander, Lt. Gen. Christopher Cavoli, and his staff were exposed to COVID-19 at a land force commanders conference in Wiesbaden, Germany, on March 6. Out of an abundance of caution, the service decided to quarantine those exposed. According to an Army spokesperson, the quarantine has no effect on operations, and the general and his staff continue to carry out duties from an isolated location.

Much was riding on Defender Europe when it comes to teaching the Army where it stands in terms of its ability to rapidly deploy a combat-credible force to Europe to support NATO and the U.S. National Defense Strategy. The exercise was also going to help the Army get more clarity on its Multi-Domain Operations concept as it morphs into official doctrine.

The service had also hoped to assess through the exercise whether its pre-positioned stock in Europe had the right equipment and was in the right place.

The Army made the difficult decision last week to reduce the size and scope of the exercise to “protect our troops,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville said.

The service had already deployed roughly 6,000 soldiers and 3,000 pieces of equipment from the U.S. beginning in January in support of the Defender Europe exercise, McConville said, and also deployed a brigade combat team and a division-sized headquarters.

The Army also has moved about 9,000 vehicles and pieces of equipment from Army pre-positioned stocks in Europe for the exercise, he noted.

“One of the big objectives of this exercise was what we call strategic readiness,” McConville said, “the ability to dynamically employ our forces from the United States, and we were able to demonstrate most of those capabilities. We were able to get our forces over there, we have a draw from the pre-positioned stocks and we’re still able to train with our allies and partners, although at much less capability.”

Those units that won’t be able to train through some of the linked exercises in Europe are already “tactically ready” and could maintain readiness through home station training, McConville added.

Lessons learned will directly feed into how the Army crafts its future doctrine and help validate that the service is ready to execute what is laid out in the National Defense Strategy.

But the other thing the Army has learned from the spread of COVID-19 and its effects on the exercise is that the service is agile, McConville stressed. “We had to adapt the plan, we were re-missioning some units during the actual deployments; some units may go other places, and that’s why this was a very good exercise for us,” he added.

For those deployed for the exercise, McConville said that the Army has put in place a rigorous screening process for troops returning home when the exercise is complete, where they will be screened for infection before coming back and then screened again upon return to installations and posts, then quarantined as necessary.

While the Army has exercised strategic readiness, testing the ability to move seamlessly from country to country throughout the modified exercise may not get a full shake due to how European countries may choose to handle the pandemic. Border crossing was a challenge in past years. For now, there are too many uncertainties to know whether border crossing and mobility across countries will pose a problem or a challenge for the Army, according to McConville.

“Italy was a little ahead of us” in coping with the spread of the virus,” McConville said, “but Europe is probably right along the same lines where we are right now, where leaders are taking a hard look at how they want to try to contain this.”

Meanwhile in the Pacific region, where COVID-19 originated and where many countries have been hard hit, the Army was able to complete a recent exercise — Cobra Gold in Thailand, McConville said. The service continues to conduct risk assessment for each upcoming exercise in the theater.

The Army is also likely to stick to its plan to focus more largely on a division-sized exercise in the Pacific in 2021 and hold a smaller version of Defender Europe, rather than ramp up the European exercise back up to the intended size for 2020, McConville said. But there are still many unknowns, he added, and the Army will continue to assess its options.

“The sensor design work will improve the missile defense system’s ability to neutralize more threats and improve its manufacturability,” the statement read. The company did not disclose the contract amount or timelines to develop a design.

The THAAD weapon system is part of the Army’s layered approach to missile defense, now with its ability to defeat ballistic missile threats in the terminal phase of flight, but the Missile Defense Agency also wants to make it part of its future homeland defense architecture.

BAE already provides the seeker for the THAAD system, which uses infrared imagery to guide the interceptors to threat targets, and the company has delivered more than 500 THAAD seekers to date, according to the statement.

While the seekers are built in Nashua, New Hampshire, and Endicott, New York, the company plans to conduct design work for the next-generation seeker in Huntsville, Alabama, home of Redstone Arsenal and the Army’s missiles and space programs.

BAE Systems is building a state-of-the-art facility that will house a “cutting-edge” design program in Huntsville, the company noted.

While the Army plans to continue using THAAD far into the future, the MDA is, in fiscal 2021, planning to allocated $273.6 million for THAAD development efforts, including the THAAD homeland defense tier.

Specifically, the agency is asking for $139 million in FY21 to start the development and demonstration of a new interceptor prototype for THAAD, which could support a tiered and layered approach to homeland defense.

BAE Systems did not say whether the next-generation interceptor design work includes efforts related to MDA’s desire to produce a new interceptor prototype.

The agency is “challenging ourselves” to figure out how to develop a THAAD interceptor that would work against an intercontinental ballistic missile, Vice Adm. Jon Hill, the MDA’s director, said when the FY21 defense budget request was released in February. To do that, the MDA is seeking to draw lessons from building THAAD batteries for Saudi Arabia, he said.

The agency is also looking at the existing engineering trade space.

“We may consider an upgraded propulsion stack to give [THAAD] extended range, don’t know yet,” he said. “It could be that we don’t want to update the propulsion. Maybe there is something in the seeker that would buy us more in the trade space now.”

The THAAD interceptor program is a new start in the FY21 budget request, Hill noted. “We are working our way through what that program would look like.”

The antenna array went into an indoor, climate-controlled test range, and its performance was evaluated against simulated targets, Bob Kelley, Raytheon’s director of domestic integrated air and missile defense programs for business development and strategy, said during a March 16 interview.

The technology “came out fantastic on the other side,” he added.

Now the array will be mounted on a precision-machined enclosure for integration, Kelley said, and then it will head to a range for testing with real-world targets such as air traffic coming in and out of Boston’s Logan International Airport.

Raytheon is plowing ahead with an aggressive schedule to deliver the first LTAMDS radar to the Army next year. So far it’s on track and on schedule.

The company finished building the first radar antenna array in less than 120 days after being selected for the job, following a competition to replace the service’s Patriot air and missile defense system sensor.

The radar will become a part of the service’s future Integrated Air and Missile Defense System that will replace the entire Patriot system. Raytheon also manufactures the Patriot.

Raytheon has taken its years of experience refining gallium nitride technology at its Massachusetts-based foundry to help design a new radar system that will provide the Army 360-degree threat detection capability in a configuration that includes one large array in the front and two smaller arrays in the back.

The contract is worth roughly $384 million to deliver six production-representative units of the LTAMDS. The Army is working to rapidly deliver initial capability under an urgent materiel release.

The service in 2019 held a “sense-off” at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, between three working radars from Raytheon, a Lockheed Martin and Elta Systems team, and Northrop Grumman.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is seeking to power its brigades using electric and hybrid sources in order to break free of the burden of fuel and disposable batteries that bog down its logistics tail and limit mobility and reach, a general with Army Futures Command has told Defense News.

Lt. Gen. Eric Wesley, the director of the Futures and Concepts Center within the command, said in a recent interview that it’s one thing to power a vehicle electrically, but quite another to work out an entire enterprise that would support fleets of electric vehicles and other capabilities.

“Let’s be clear. We’re behind. We’re late to meet on this thing,” Wesley said. “If you look at all of the analysis, all of the various nations that we work with, they’re all going to electric power with their automotive fleet, and right now, although we do [science and technology] and we’ve got some research and development going on and we can build prototypes, in terms of a transition plan, we are not there.”

For instance, the Army tested a hybrid Chevy Colorado — fitted with a hydrogen fuel cell and electric drive — with several units, but nothing amounted to the effort.

Buying an all-electric Tesla vehicle, Wesley said, is easy, but “the Army has to think about it much bigger. What is the cost of replacing your entire fleet? We know we can’t do that. There’s got to be a steady transition.”

There will likely be a time where vehicles that use fossil fuel and ones that are all-electric share the battlefield. “What is the distribution plan that enables that?” Wesley wondered. “That is much more complex when you look at the implications for an entire enterprise.”

So Wesley’s outfit is preparing a proposal for the head of Army Futures Command that will address how the service might accomplish such a big, but important endeavor that could change the paradigm of the logistics and sustainment tails as well as enhance force mobility.

The proposal will make a business case for the Army electrifying the formation, discuss the technical feasibility and describe how a transition process.

There are three major reasons it’s important the Army embark on this now as opposed to just dabbling with electrification capability, Wesley said. The service knows it must build a fleet more reliant on electric power than fossil fuels. While the Army previously dealt with prototypes and knows it can make electric vehicles, the service must get its arms around the capability “in a much more holistic way,” Wesley stressed, and that will take time to work out.

The entire automotive industry is going electric, Wesley said, so the Army will have to do the same or risk problems with resources and supply chains down the line; if industry no longer builds parts for fossil fuel-reliant vehicles, availability of those parts will diminish and their cost will increase.

The Army also views electrically powered brigades as advantageous when considering how it expects to operate in the future. The service’s emerging doctrine Multi-Domain Operations requires units to operate distributed and independently for longer periods of time in potentially contested environments.

“We have to operate distributed, which means you have to have organic power that is readily available,” Wesley said. “Another aspect of Multi-Domain Operations … when you think about it, a lot of technology is being distributed at lower and lower echelons, and the question is always: ‘How are we going to power these different tools that we use in operations, highly technical tools, that we use to integrate domains? How are you going to power those?’

“Electrification allows you to have access to readily available power to distribute not only for the vehicle but for all those different systems that I have.”

And other benefits abound, he added, including dealing with less parts. The general noted that a Tesla’s moving parts are a few dozen while the number of moving parts in an internal combustion engine can be in the thousands. In the electric vehicle, the parts are also modular and don’t break down due to interaction with each other, but rather individual failures, Wesley said, so that means broken parts can easily be replaced.

In addition, batteries from one vehicle to another would be similar or exactly the same, so parts across the fleet would have more commonality, he said. Electric vehicles are also quiet and have a low heat signature, which means they are less likely to be detected by opposing forces, he added.

While a transition to electrically powered brigades would have a substantial price tag, the cost of one would be much lower than the cost to power the brigade with fossil fuel now, he argued.

The Army is also considering powering its capabilities with other forms of energy such as nuclear power — a technological leap that isn’t far off, according to Wesley.

The Pentagon is investing roughly $400 million across the next five years in an attempt to develop prototypes for mobile nuclear power. The idea is to “pelletize” nuclear fuel encased in such a manner “to preclude the escape of radioactivity that allows you to leverage nuclear fission in such a way that it becomes safe,” Wesley explained.

The three-star general said there are at least nine vendors interested in building a prototype that could be built in the next two to three years, which would provide enough power to provide energy to an entire forward-operating base for an extended period of time.

“Imagine a mobile nuclear power capability that can fit on the back of a truck. Now you’re generating your own energy.”