After completing a series of testing with the General Dynamics [GD] prototype for the Marine Corps’ Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle (ARV) program in 2023, this year will include further risk reduction efforts to inform requirements and ongoing discussions with the service to potentially build a 30mm gun and turret version of the platform, the company said.
In an interview with Defense Daily, Phil Skuta, GD Land Systems’ director of U.S. Marine Corps and Navy strategy and business development, detailed the company’s testing experience to date, as the Marine Corps looks to move the ARV program from the current competitive prototyping effort to the engineering and manufacturing development EMD phase.
“The testing and demonstration activities allowed us to collect data to ensure we’ll meet and can exceed the requirements the Marine Corps has currently put out for the ARV. We’re confident we can achieve the peak performance requirements and competitively position ourselves for the next phase of the program,” he said on Thursday.
The Marine Corps’ competitive prototyping effort for ARV, to help find a replacement for its legacy Light Armored Vehicles, has involved evaluation offerings from GD Land Systems and Textron Systems [TXT] as well as a version of BAE Systems’ ACV integrated with a suite of C4/UAS capabilities.
Marc Shepard, GD Land Systems’ senior program manager for ARV, told Defense Daily the company is in ongoing discussions with the Marine Corps on design and build efforts for an ARV 30mm turret prototype, to support further testing efforts.
“We anticipate the opportunity to get on contract by early to mid-spring,” Shepard said.
The Marine Corps is also planning to hold an industry day in February to provide more information on its plans for the coming EMD phase, according to Skuta.
Last year’s formal testing activities with the ARV prototypes ran from January through November, with events at the Nevada Automotive Test Center, Army Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland and Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in California that focused on demonstrations assessing the offerings C4/UAS capabilities, land and water mobility and also included blast and kinetic tests and cyber and electromagnetic interference assessments, according to GD Land Systems.
Skuta specifically highlighted an operational evaluation at Camp Pendleton last year, which involved putting the prototype offerings through a “cross-country mobility portfolio” and allowed Marines an opportunity to operate the vehicles themselves.
“Having Marines operate the ARV and provide feedback was very valuable. That constructive feedback is priceless,” Skuta said. “What they were really putting the vehicles through the paces on was the connectivity with the higher and adjacent headquarters. So that was to understand how the vehicle communicates over multiple paths of communication, whether that’s through satellite communications channels or the different data channels for data exchange.”
The event also included an evaluation of the prototype vehicles’ integration with a Marine Corps-provided “Class 2 UAS with Class 3 capabilities,” with Skuta adding GD was “very successful” in this scenario.
“For instance, [the UAS] would fly ahead of the vehicle and was given a tactical assignment to go look at a point of interest, which was anywhere five to 20 kilometers in front of the ARV. The UAS would go out, take a look at that area of interest and then was assessed on the ability of the video and other information to come back into the vehicle, be processed and then go to higher headquarters in a notional reconnaissance information gathering scenario,” Skuta said.
Along with the discussions on a potential 30mm turret variant of the platform, Skuta said 2024 will also include working on a second systems integration lab, work on a study related to future payloads and variants and further risk reduction prototype testing.
“These four areas all are going to help the Marine Corps further inform [ARV] requirements and the move toward EMD,” Skuta said.