Recent technological advancements have helped the Army overcome concerns that existing active protection systems (APS) for ground vehicles are unsafe and unreliable and could result in fielding some form of anti-missile shield by 2018.
The Army plans to make a “no, no-go decision’ on whether to expedite existing APS technologies to the field in early 2017, Lt. Gen. Michael Williamson, military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology, told lawmakers April 5. With continued funding of the effort, units could deploy with APS-equipped vehicles in 2018.
“The need to take advantage of these technologies is critical and we are seeing our adversaries start to take advantage,” Williamson said. “We are not unfamiliar with the capabilities of active protection systems. We have made choices that we wanted those systems to mature from a safety standpoint, from a reliability standpoint and therefore have not employed them.”
Lt. Gen. John Murray, deputy chief of staff of the Army, warned that fielding even an off-the-shelf APS device in 2018 would be nearly impossible if the service were returned to sequestration-level funding.
Any reluctance to fund or field APS technologies by the U.S. will put it further behind potential enemies that possess advanced anti-tank and anti-vehicle guided missiles, said Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center and deputy commander of Training and Doctrine Command.
“We have seen these technologies before. We have seen them employed,” McMaster said. “A lot of times we pose ourselves with a false dilemma of either waiting for the perfect later or doing something now. I think this is a case where we have to do both.”
“We have to really work hard on a concept to integrate a lot of these emerging technologies log-term, but there is an immediate threat that we can see now from enemies who possess this capability and we don’t,” McMaster added. “We see that with Russia, for example.”
Any system integrated onto U.S. combat vehicles would have to pass muster with the Army Fuse Board, which determines whether a munition poses an unacceptable risk to friendly forces. An industry official recently told Defense Daily that some existing APS systems like the Israeli-made Trophy would not pass a Fuse Board inspection because it’s hard-kill shotgun-like rocket countermeasure poses a threat to dismounted troops and vehicle occupants.
Trophy is the only existing system that has successfully shot down rockets in combat. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has developed another similar system. Raytheon [RTN] and Lockheed Martin [LMT] also have developed APS systems with a variety of methods to defeat incoming rockets and anti-tank missiles.
Advancements in commercial and allied APS technologies as recently as the last 24 months have allowed the Army to reconsider buying non-developmental APS, Williamson said.
The Army is considering four existing APS technologies and is working to integrate them on a Bradley, a Stryker and an M1 Abrams tank. Completion of the integration testing is funded in the Army’s fiscal 2017 budget request. Several layers of protection are being considered in the short term that also eventually will be rolled into the Modular Active Protection System (MAPS) program of record.
First, the Army is considering ways to spoof incoming missiles by obscuring its vehicles from detection and tracking. If that “soft-kill” countermeasure doesn’t work, the next layer of protection will be a system that disables a missile’s seeker or ability to arm and explode. Williamson said the majority of anti-tank guided missiles – up to 90 percent – can be taken out through electronic means that would pose no threat to dismounted troops.
Finally, the Army wants a kinetic, “hard-kill” capability that can physically destroy incoming threats.
“What we know is that some of those technologies are more mature than others,” Williamson said. “What we want to do is reach out and we have started that…to take advantage of existing system.”