The Army’s fiscal year 2014 budget request continues to support modernization leading to technological advantage, requesting $592.2 million for continued research, development, test and evaluation of the restructured Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV).

General Dynamics [GD] and BAE Systems each are working under separate contracts on the technology development phase.

FY 2014 Defense Department briefing charts on the budget said the program was restructured, as noted in a DoD acquisition decision memorandum received in January 2013, to reduce costs and improve program affordability, only one contractor team will move into EMD instead of the original plan to carry two contractor teams forward.

At this point in time, both General Dynamics and BAE are heading toward Critical Design Reviews in the fall, in their competition to fulfill Army requirements for the GCV, despite criticism of the program–most recently from an early April Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report supporting other options.

“It appears that they’re using the original Army Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) description of the GCV,” Steve Franz, senior director Ground Combat Vehicle Program for General Dynamics told Defense Daily. “It appears that the description of the ground combat vehicle that they’re using is over two years old.”

For competitive reasons, Franz said he would not offer specifics, but there are differences between the vehicle CBO was discussing and what the company is offering.

Mark Signorelli, vice president and general manager of BAE Vehicle Systems, said, “The biggest flaw we see in the report is that the notional GCV that they use for their comparisons bears no resemblance either to the requirements that the program gave us to bid against or to our vehicle design.”

It’s a much less capable vehicle that CBO is talking about, he said, and if BAE offered it to the GCV program, they would not have received a contract award. 

“One thing that we noted that was probably missing from the analysis was any kind of assessment of life-cycle costs, which the program has been very clear is important,” he said. “When they assess program risk, they essentially gave no credit for what for us has been two years of independent research and development in GCV and then over a year of contract research and development that we believe has significantly reduced or mitigated the risks associated with the program.”

The CBO report examined four alternatives to the current program, none of which would continue with the GCV program in its current state, despite saying “none of those alternatives would meet all of the Army’s goals for the GCV program.” Those alternatives would be less costly and risky than the office anticipates would be the case under the Army plan.

Since the initial AoA, the Army has been conducting a revised analysis of alternatives as directed by the Defense Department’s acquisition chief at the Milestone A review (Defense Daily, April 14, 2011).

The Acquisition Decision Memorandum also directed the service to move contractors to the technology development phase, a second action was to examine non-developmental vehicles in a realistic environment and to do an Analysis of Alternatives update.

This AoA update is said to be some 500 pages of detailed analysis not only looking at non-developmental vehicles such as the Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Rheinmetall Landsysteme’ Puma and the Namer, developed by the Israeli Ordnance Corps, but any other potential alternatives.

In a statement, the Army said that throughout 2012, it conducted a Non-Developmental Vehicle (NDV) assessment with a combination of live testing and engineering analysis that evaluated domestic and international vehicles. “The assessments confirmed that currently fielded vehicles are optimized for performance within their expected operating environments, but are limited with regard to specific GCV capability performance areas. Although all assessed NDVs met some of the critical GCV requirements, none met the minimum set of GCV requirements without needing significant redesign.”

The coming Army report is expected to be “extremely more detailed and potentially more accurate” than the CBO report, Franz said.

 “We’re on deck to do a preliminary design review in September of this year,” Signorelli said. “We did a very extensive analysis and simulation of the propulsion system. We were very meticulous in in the design and I think the other thing that we did we were very meticulous in selecting components and mature technology. While that integrated propulsion system is a relatively new item, the components that went in there were all very mature and robust so we weren’t pushing technology while we were trying to integrate the propulsion system.” 

Franz said, “We have periodic reviews of our design with the government following a standard systems engineering process.

Both companies have conducted system requirements reviews and system functional reviews with the customer.

In October, General Dynamics will have its preliminary design review, he said. “These reviews are pass-fail reviews. We have to complete the reviews to get to the next phase.”

Franz said they have done extensive modeling and computer aided design, and were able to utilize the virtual collaboration available through General Dynamics’ Maneuver Collaboration Center (mc2). “The mc2 is a source of innovative ideas we are incorporating into the GCV,” he said. It’s a key way to get people who don’t normally interact with defense companies to become involved. 

The Army wants the best final design for its requirements, which will then be built as prototypes during the EMD phase by the winning contractor. 

The GD team includes Raytheon [RTN], Lockheed Martin [LMT] and General Dynamics C4 Systems.

The BAE GCV team includes Northrop Grumman [NOC] and Saft.