The U.S. Army plans to modernize nearly its entire medium and heavy tactical truck fleet by 2025, then give them robot brains so they can drive convoys–even in urban terrain–without soldiers behind the wheel, Lt. Gen. Larry Wyche, deputy commander of Army Materiel Command, said Aug. 25
Wyche explained how the Army would “deliver adaptable, flexible, sustainment to our soldiers.” The answer is what he called the “truck of the future,” he said at the annual Tactical Wheeled Vehicles Conference, hosted by the National Defense Industrial Association outside Washington, D.C.
The Joint Tactical Truck System (JTTS) will replace more than 50 legacy medium and heavy tactical wheeled vehicle platforms, Wyche said. They include elements of the family of medium tactical vehicles, the Oshkosh [OSK] M977 heavy expanded mobility tactical truck (HEMTT),palletized load system (PLS) variants and various iterations of the 2.5- and 5-ton trucks. The JTTS will be modular so that it can be reconfigured to carry out a wide variety of battlefield tasks.
“It will reduce the sustainment burden on the force due to common parts, improved fuel efficiency and reducing the number of platforms within the future tactical truck inventory,” Wyche said.
As far as divesting the current fleets of medium and heavy tactical vehicles while investing in future platforms like JTTS and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), Wyche said it would require maintaining a “delicate balance.”
“We have to look at the risk and then we have to look at where we invest our money, given that we do see there will be a reduction in dollars,” he said. “We’re going to invest where we need to so that we get the right capability to our soldiers on the battlefield.”
The Army plans to evaluate the need for a JTTS capability during its Force 2025 evaluations–a set of exercises and analyses through fiscal year 2017 that will chart a course for what the Army and its equipment should look like by 2025, Wyche said.
Even before JTTS becomes a reality, the Army wants to retrofit existing trucks with autonomous capabilities so it can remove soldiers from the cab during convoys, and therefore reduce the risk to personnel from roadside bombs and ambush.
Army engineers already have demonstrated autonomous or optionally manned capability retrofit kits on existing vehicles. Recently at Fort Hood, Texas, three medium trucks drove through a simulated urban environment without drivers and successfully obeyed traffic laws while avoiding pedestrians and other vehicles.
“This technology could be ideal for situations like humanitarian relief during a natural disaster or resupplying troops both for peacetime or war,” according to an Army video demonstrating its driverless trucks.
In another test, a convoy of seven vehicles outfitted with commercially available sensors and vehicle-to-vehicle communication systems were shown driving at full speed, maintaining the same pace and spacing, along a highway in differing weather conditions.
“We want to move to the next level,” Wyche said, based on the recent successful demonstration of driverless truck technology. “We want to develop systems that will allow soldiers to focus on mission-critical tasks, ultimately removing the soldiers from driving the platform altogether.”
The Army in the longer term is interested in unmanned aerial resupply, a capability the Marine Corps already has demonstrated in combat with the Kaman [KAMN] K-Max optionally manned helicopter. The service is looking into autonomous cargo handling for loading and unloading at ports and forward operating bases, Wyche said.
“Autonomous and unmanned systems will redefine how the Army executes its mission to sustain the force,” he said.
The Army is making strategic investments in tactical vehicle research and development, Wyche said. Materiel Command’s current science and technology portfolio is worth $1.6 billion, which represents 75 percent of the service’s total S+T budget, he said.
In fiscal year 2016, the Army has set aside 20 percent of its S+T budget for ground maneuver, including research into unmanned and autonomous ground vehicles, he said.