By Ann Roosevelt
FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla.–The Defense Department Acquisition Executive has approved the release of the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) Request for Proposal (RFP).
The GCV is the Army’s new effort to replace the manned ground vehicle program, terminated by Defense Secretary Robert Gates as part of his revamping of the Future Combat System program.
“We released the RFP for the contract of the technology development phase of the GCV program,” Marlin Carlsen, PEO Integration deputy project manager for GCV within the Program Executive Office Integration, told Defense Daily at the Association of the United States Army Winter Seminar here.
Proposals are due April 26 for the approximately 27-month contract, he said. As many as three contracts could be awarded by the new fiscal year.
Contractors BAE Systems and General Dynamics [GD], which worked together on the canceled MGV program, are examining the RFP.
“We’ve seen the proposal, are reviewing it and looking forward to participating,” Scott Fazekas, director of Media Relations, BAE Systems Inc., told Defense Daily here.
General Dynamics spokesman Karl Oskoian said, “We have received the GCV RFP and will be responding.”
“We want the best of industry to put together their best design that fully satisfies those requirements.”
The Army met with the Pentagon’s chief acquisition officer, Ashton Carter, for the Materiel Development Decision (MDD) earlier this week, which approved the RFP release. Soon to follow is an Acquisition Decision Memorandum with more detail about what the program needs to do going into a Milestone A decision,
Carlsen’s office has already started work on the documentation for Milestone A, “tentatively scheduled in August,” he said. That’s the official start of the technology development phase. There will also be a review of potential contract awards.
While the 27-month contract is not enough time to build a full-up vehicle prototype, the RFP will ask for prototypes of critical subsystems to be evaluated.
In about two weeks, there will be a pre-proposal conference, though the date is yet to be set.
But the Army hews to the plan that “from the point of contract to when the first production vehicle rolls off the production line is seven years,” Carlsen said.