BAE Systems showed off a combination of mature technologies from throughout the company’s portfolio, many of them related to the now-canceled Ground Combat Vehicle, as a sign to Army officials visiting during the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference what the not-so-distant future could look like for ground combat units.
Dean Medland, business development director for combat vehicles, said that the Future Technology–essentially BAE’s GCV entrant plus additional weapons and sensors for situational awareness-–is meant to force Army and industry officials to think about how to best leverage existing investments and mature technologies into future acquisition projects as well as vehicle modernization efforts.
“It’s less about the product and more about the approach,” he said.
In addition to the fully assembled FTD vehicle, several of the GCV subsystems were on display at the AUSA conferece, including its hybrid electric drive transmission, genset engine, Energy Storage System (ESS), Commander’s Independent Weapon Station, Integrated Driver Crew Station and more. The vehicle on display had two engines capable of producing more than 550 kilowatts each. Power not used for driving the vehicle would go to power the two ESSs, large lithium ion nano-iron-phosphate batteries than can store up to 250 kilowatts each.
With so much onboard power, the FTD vehicle was outfitted with a Mk 38 Tactical Laser System, a BAE product developed for the Navy. BAE also displayed a high-power microwave weapon and an electromagnetic railgun, also Navy projects.
“With that level of onboard power, you then have the ability to power something that with previous generations of vehicle you just couldn’t,” Medland said.
The idea behind showing off subsystems from a canceled program and weapons being developed for the Navy–which currently tend to require so much power they could only be used on large ships–is not to convince an Army program manager to go out and buy them today, Medland said.
“It’s not to say, here you go, go take one of these [Future Technology Demonstrators] away. It’s, this is the kind of capability hybrid electric drive gives you, but even more so, with TRL 6 and 7 technology, these are the kinds of things that are within grasp in the next couple of years,” he said. He hopes both military and industry officials will stop and think about “what can we leverage, what capabilities do we have both within the program office, within the [science and technology] community, but also in the [original equipment manufacturer] community. We don’t want to go reinvent the wheel in the tracked vehicle market; there are lots of capabilities out here today.”
Still, the Mk 38 TLS program officials were hoping to gauge Army interest in their product in case there are any upcoming funding opportunities. The weapon system, which ties a laser gun in with the targeting system on the Mk 38 Machine Gun System, had been receiving some funding under the Office of Naval Research’s Solid State Laser Technology Maturation effort. The first phase has ended, and the broad agency announcement for the second phase is expected out at the end of the month, Stephen Sohm, senior project engineer with the Mk 38 TLS, told
Defense Daily at the AUSA conference.
The Army is pursuing its own laser gun system with the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD), though it is a much larger, more powerful system meant to engage larger targets such as rockets, artillery and cruise missiles. The Mk 38 TLS has been focused on small drones, swarm boats and other smaller threats. Putting the Mk 38 TLS on a combat vehicle would present a whole new capability for the Army, and “we’re trying to find out how serious is the Army about it, how interested the Army is about pursuing this, especially in a combat vehicle. So depending on what feedback we get here, that will most likely give us some direction for internal funding or other funding sources to pursue on the Army side,” Sohm said.