By Ann Roosevelt
The Army is looking ahead to receiving insights and assessments on its requirements and acquisition approach from defense contractors after its first Industry Day on the anticipated Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program, service officials said.
“We’re bringing industry in early to let them know exactly what we’re thinking,” Col. Bryan McVeigh, product manager, Program Executive Office (PEO) Integration, said in a roundtable yesterday.
This interaction will “allow us the ability to adjust our acquisition approach based on the insights that we could gain from industry,” he said. “All of this is moving towards working on a Request for Proposals on the GCV program.”
On the requirements side, Rickey Smith, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (Forward) at the Army Training and Doctrine Command, (TRADOC), said, “By opening the aperture and getting feedback from industry early on in our process, before we lock down where those operational requirements end, is very important to us…”
As operational requirements are refined, it’s a series of decisions, Smith said, what is out there, what is doable, and that is aggregated with what the Army has learned in seven years of war from specific data from specific events, operational rates, current and projected threats out to about 2017-25 and other things.
An operational lesson learned, Smith said, is that every vehicle the Army is putting into combat has been modified, and in some cases multiple times. “We should be thinking up front about a vehicle that can be modified. We see that as an operational requirement.”
If still relevant, operational requirements from FCS are likely to remain, for example, vehicle health management systems. The question becomes it is doable, but at what cost. From current conflicts, the ability of crew and squads to get in and out of vehicles is important, with the loads they carry, he said.
Also, there are operational must haves, such as network capability, force protection, and survivability. Here, the Army must weigh how high or low to set the bar and what metrics should apply.
In all these areas, industry inputs help refine the work and allow trades to be made earlier.
The Army strategy of early engagement with industry to refine what it wants its next vehicle to be began with the release of a Sources Sought announcement in September, through a top level briefing on the Oct. 16 Industry Day hosted by PEO Integration and TRADOC, and will drill into specifics at a second Industry Day Nov. 23-24 at the Army Tank- Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center at Detroit Arsenal, Mich.
Industry Day 1 provided industry with a look at top-level requirements by category, where the Army was going with the program, and the type of information the service was looking for, McVeigh said. Industry was also told how to access the “body of knowledge” learned during the Future Combat Systems’ (FCS) development work on the Manned Ground Vehicles (MGV). In April, Defense Secretary Robert Gates canceled the MGC portion of FCS.
This was “so industry would have a good idea of what we had spent six years in development for and basically establish a baseline for what we thought the art of the doable was from our perspective,” McVeigh said.
The Web Site will also have the TRADOC preliminary Capability Development Document (CDD) and a preliminary A-Spec, the detailed document presenting design parameters and suggested technical specifics going beyond the CDD that industry can comment on or ask questions about.
“The real ‘a ha!’ Is that this is a TRADOC product, it’s pre-decisional…we really believe we have to get industry’s input now so that when we do move toward decisions, start moving toward a material milestone we have the best from across all of industry to add to the body of knowledge as we come forward,” Smith said.
McVeigh said at Industry Day 2 defense contractors can expected to hear about detailed specifications, a review of what changed in the CDD, hear answers to questions from the first Industry Day, and updates to the program plan. Additionally, classified specifications and requirements will be detailed.
The operational requirements still adhere to guidance earlier in the year given to Task Force 120 as it prepared to examine requirements for the new vehicle: to leverage what was learned in current operations and the MGV acquisition and then set the bar on technical readiness so it is grounded in feasibility and at a point where it can be assessed and reassessed for future upgrades or modernization.
While the Pentagon held a defense acquisition board in-process review, which included the GCV, the same day as Industry Day 1, no decisions were made. While Smith attended the meeting, it was an acquisition meeting, with a statement to come, possibly later this week.
Smith did say that, “From our perspective on the operational requirements I’ll say we were told to continue to march on the approach we were taking.”