By Marina Malenic
An ambitious Army effort to restart a future vehicle program by Labor Day could yield weight data this fall for incorporation into a future airlift concept being developed jointly with the Air Force, a top official said last week.
In the wake of a decision to terminate the Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV) portion of the Army’s multibillion-dollar modernization effort, the Future Combat Systems (FCS), Army officials have said the service’s Training and Doctrine Command will come up with requirement specifications for the new vehicle by Labor Day.
In turn, that data–and, in particular, the expected weight of the new vehicles–will inform the Joint Future Theater Lift (JFTL) program, an effort intended to provided airlift access directly to the battlefield.
“We anticipate that we’ll have that [weight data] by this fall,” Col. Martha Meeker, chief of global mobility and the Special Operations requirements division for the Air Force, told Defense Daily.
“Now that the manned ground vehicle is being reexamined, we have got to join with the Army to make sure that we are in lockstep with them,” she said in a May 14 interview at the Pentagon. “As they set their requirement, we need to be able to move them by air.”
Meeker said the emergence of the new data points by this fall “should marry up well” with her office’s analysis of alternatives (AoA) for the new airplane. But that process can be slowed if the Army does not conclude its study on the anticipated timeline–she noted that some modeling can be done with an estimated weight range, rather than holding out for a fixed number.
“We wouldn’t get past the point in the AoA where we couldn’t adjust for the Army inputs on their final weight range,” she explained. “I think we have to hold on the AoA until the Army gives us” an estimate.
She noted that the JFTL is still in an “exploratory stage.” Each of the services is currently examining the program and providing feedback.
“Then after that, we get to the AoA,” Meeker explained. “We’ve still got a year’s worth of letting the engineers…take on this program and tell us what is feasible,” she said, describing the process.
The result of that evaluation will be a “cost versus capability” analysis document that will provide officials with a range of options for the new platform, Meeker said.
“We need to get out there and find out what’s PowerPoint and what’s reality,” she added. “It’s translating that Power Point into metal that gets you into cost growth and into trouble sometimes.”
Asked whether budget constraints could cause Pentagon decision-makers to rethink the need for such an experimental effort altogether, Meeker said operational needs would be the primary driver for any such decision. She said the current need to quickly access remote battlefields indicates a strong need for a JFTL concept.
“If we maintain, inside the [Defense Department], this desire to go to more and more dispersed [operations]…then we’ll maintain the Joint Future Theater Lift program,” she explained.
The next step for the program will be the completion of an Initial Capabilities Document by early July, according to Meeker. But the key effort this year will be incorporation of the new Army vehicle data into analytical models.
“The Army will make that vehicle meet the ground soldier’s need. It will not be developed to fit in an airplane,” she said. “We will adjust to the Army. You can’t short-change the guy on the ground to make it fit in an airplane.”