By B.C. Kessner
The Army’s Tactical Wheeled Vehicle Strategy spells out clearly something that the president of Granite Tactical Vehicles knew well before he teamed with Textron [TXT] on an armored V-hull solution for a potential recapitalization competition: High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV), or Humvees, will be around for longer than many people once thought.
“Two to three years ago, everyone thought Humvees were getting kicked to the curb,” Chris Berman, Granite’s founder and president, told Defense Daily recently. “With Textron, we’ve developed a high performance, highly survivable solution that gave back weight…it’s lighter than the current up-armored Humvee (UAH), plus we gave belly protection,” he added.
While it will be several years before the arrival of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) designed to fill light tactical vehicle capability gaps exposed through a period of persistent conflict in multiple theaters, the Army is seeking a recap of HMMWVs to improve protection while sustaining or improving automotive performance, Dennis Haag, the Army’s Product Manager, Light Tactical Vehicles, told Defense Daily Tuesday in an e-mail.
“By opening the HMMWV Recap program to competition and encouraging partnership with the government owned industrial base (depots and arsenals), we hope to capitalize on the engineering and design expertise of industry to provide a level of protection that makes a viable choice for combat operations,” Haag added.
Textron officially teamed with Granite in the summer of 2009 to provide major-firm augmentation and support to what had already impressed executives as a lot of great work by Berman and his team, according to Stephen Greene, Textron’s communications vice president. “There was magic in the design…it was very elegant, and very simple.”
The design was also controversial.
According to Berman, the Army a couple of years ago tested a V-hull on a Humvee. “They boxed it in, and then when drove it, the vehicle overheated. There was no airflow going through the tunnel, so the thing cooked and they said within 30 minutes it was dead,” Berman said.
When Textron and Granite came forward with the V-hull design for what could potentially be a multi-billion dollar Humvee recapitalization program, everybody was saying it would never work because it had been tested on a Humvee and failed, he added.
“We have dispelled that myth,” Berman said.
Textron and Granite recently completed thermal testing of a V-hull configured Small Combat Tactical Vehicle Capsule in Yuma, Ariz. “We did great on the thermal tests and had no signs of negative impact resulting from the capsule design,” Berman said Monday. “In fact, we outperformed and actually ran cooler than the stock up-armored Humvee with an open bottom.”
Granite’s design keeps the passageway open and ducted so as to produce a kind of Venturi effect. Berman said. “We’re moving more airflow through than they do. If you look up under the tunnel of a Humvee, the fuel tank is mounted to that whole tunnel…so everything is fastened up there in a way [that] there is no place for any air to flow above the transmission. “Our capsule is up above and our transmission is down…and we’ve lowered everything to create 3 inches of open throat all the way down the entire tunnel where they just had obstacles, so we’ve have greater flow,” he added.
Berman said he still hears mechanics and engineers from rival firms saying that the whole Humvee capsule concept is trash, that it overheated six months ago, and that the Army and Marine Corps have kicked it to the side. “Well, that’s great misinformation, but we see the printouts, and we’ve got the data…so there is nothing to that theory,” he said.
Granite and Textron’s approach is to start with a Humvee, discard the body and keep the chassis. Their capsule is still of the ‘monocoque’ design that some competing firms are offering for armored survivability, but it accommodates the Humvee’s frame rails and adds a sacrificial V-hull bolted underneath.
The V-hull is bolted on such a way that the plate is not rigidly connected to the capsule, allowing it to flex and disperse blast energy into the armored hull, Berman said.
“If you take one like [a competitor’s] that is open at the bottom, when you take that blast, you’re going to get the capsule wanting to open up…that’s where you’re going to get your breaches,” Berman said. “With us, the bottom V-hull will actually push outward, invert itself and crush the soft components of the transmission and things…it deforms to a certain point, and then turn back out.” The transmission and underside components do not fly in because the capsule is armored there too, and separate from the fuel cell, he added.
The V-hull concept has been a key to enhanced vehicle survivability, as illustrated in the performance of modern Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) All Terrain Vehicles (ATV), and going back decades ago to protected vehicles driving through the minefields in South Africa, Berman said. The bolt-on adaptation allows for migration of the concept over to the Humvee, he added.
Someone had to find a way to wrap it around a Humvee, Berman said. Others were building monocoque capsules and either mounting them up on top of the frame or making it where the capsule was its own frame. “To keep the Humvee intact we designed it to go back over the tunnel and then have a bolt on sacrificial V-hull…so it was the simplest.”
Other solutions cut the frame, requiring a front clip and a rear clip, he said. “So the front section bolts to the capsule, and the back section bolts to the capsule and all that has done is cut out about 7 feet of two frame rails, which probably eliminates about 80 pounds, and the real problem is that you essentially have a new vehicle platform,” Berman said.
“How much testing are you going to have to go through before you prove that front end is actually going to stay on there?” Berman asked. “Where is the fatigue going to lie on the frame and the capsule? And some of these solutions are very tall, they’re not going to fit in most aircraft,” he added.
“We go on the Humvee, while others become a unibody sort of structure,” Berman said. “If you look at the mission profiles that exist today, we’ve stayed right there in the same pocket, and others are outside of that with theirs.”
According to Berman, the Textron-Granite recap offering stays within the limits of what is going to be required, and at 13,000 pounds weighs less than an UAH with frag kits, even before a turret is added to the latter. “We can be airdropped, and we can fit in any of the Humvee mission profiles, he said.
Another feature that Berman said sets the Granite design apart is a combination of what is missing and what is added. “We’re slick on the inside,” he said. Absent are reinforcement beams and gun system supports that Berman described as “teeth everywhere that are going to bite you.”
Added are about six inches of width inside the capsule, right where soldiers need the extra elbow room, he added.
“When I look at some of the others, I can guarantee you they’re not talking to a warfighter because they have reduced the width of that cab, outside to outside is narrower than the hood. So, where we gave six inches of width on the inside they’ve taken away at least four inches. “How would you like to like to go into the back of a Humvee in full battle rattle and sit with four inches less space?”
Berman is a former Navy SEAL and served as a contractor for a major security firm in Iraq until several of his teammates were killed there in 2004. The vehicles they were riding in did not have enough protection to withstand serious attacks. He immediately began designing and building armored vehicles at the conclusion of that tour, and said he vowed to incorporate all the lessons he learned as an operator into his products.
Granite’s capsule will not crush in a rollover and the roof requires no additional support for any of the gun systems or equipment a customer would want to put up there, he said. The overall design gives a lower center of gravity and yet affords a higher ground clearance than current UAHs, he added.
Best of all, Berman said, is that the solution is field retrofitable.
“We’re simple enough that we could just send the capsule to the depot and when they are doing a standard reset, refit, recap, whichever one they’re doing, they could pull the body off to do the work…and they could do it in the field,” he said. “We could ship the capsule with same instrument cluster inside, all the brake levers, throttle, shifters, parking brake all in the same position.”
“It requires no retraining to operate the Humvee, Berman said. “Others have a chimney one, a double-V inside where you lose access from one side to another, or in some you have to move electronics from one spot to another…there are so many things to change that you have to turn right around and do retraining,” he added. “Not with ours.”
The vehicle’s performance at Aberdeen, Md., during government funded blast and ballistics testing was also fantastic, he said. “We’ve exceeded JLTV A and B, and we’re much, much lighter, you can still move us around with a helo.”
During independent blast testing, the vehicle has met MRAP thresholds, he added.
The Granite-designed vehicle’s performance during the blast tests for the Marine Corps in June of 2009 is what really got Textron’s attention, though the companies had been working together for several months previously.
“Once we saw that Textron’s confidence level was way up, we realized this was going someplace,” Berman said. Granite is a small operation and stood to benefit from Textron’s lean manufacturing, production, and research and development capabilities. “It would have been hard for our little operation to stand up and support production 10,000, or 1,000 [Humvee recaps].
According to Haag, the Army’s LTV product manager, the service is still in the process of evaluating both the question of how many HMMWVs could be recapped, and more generally, the entire light tactical fleet requirements and how the Army intends to sustain the HMMWV for the future.
There is a feeling among industry sources that the Army would likely look at recapping about 60,000 of its approximately 200,000 Humvees, to bridge the gap until the arrival of JLTV, and keep the rest for light tactical duties. Adding Humvees from the other services, as well as potential foreign military sales could put the number of Humvees in line for recap up to about 100,000.
According to sources, the cost of a Humvee recap would likely be in the $150,000 to $180,000 range per vehicle.
Textron-Granite, and several other firms, including BAE Systems, Oshkosh [OSK], and AM General with Plasan are waiting for a Humvee recap request for proposals (RFP) from the Army. Haag said the Army intends to release an RFP during FY ’11.
“Rumors about RFIs and RFPs have been running crazy and changing practically by the hour,” Berman said. “When they’re ready to go, we’re going to be ready to go, we’re already there, so timeline for us is really not a big deal.”