The Army is beginning to test non-developmental anti-missile shields for combat vehicles that it plans to field on M1 Abrams tanks and Strykers within two years, according to the service’s top uniformed weapons buyer.
Asked about the Army’s acquisition timeline to equip combat vehicles with Active Protection Systems (APS), Lt. Gen. Michael Williamson on Wednesday said “our goal is to have capability within two years.”
Photo: U.S. Army
Williamson, principal military deputy to the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisitions, logistics and technology, was testifying before the House Armed Services subcommittee on tactical air and land forces.
“With the active protection system program, we are actually taking a dual path,” Williamson said.
The Army’s program of record is called the Modular Active Protection System, or MAPS. The program will begin with “soft-kill” technologies like obscuring vehicle, electronic defeat systems and then will “graduate” into a system that includes a “hard-kill” capability or “being able to shoot down missiles fired at our equipment,” he said.
MAPS is the APS program of record and seeks to establish a baseline vehicle protection suite common to the combat vehicle fleet. The Army recently awarded Lockheed Martin [LMT] $8.5 million in contracts to develop an open-architecture controller to coordinate systems that protect armored vehicles from incoming enemy rockets.
“The intent of the MAPS program, though, is to develop a very modular system that we can apply to the wide range of combat vehicles that we have,” Williamson said. “That’s a five-year program which we started last year from an S+T standpoint, so it will be a couple of years before we are comfortable with that systems being applied to our combat vehicles.”
In the interim, the Army is taking stock of existing, non-developmental APS technologies “both domestically produced and even those that our allies have,” he said.
“We are now bringing those in this year and characterizing those on our systems to understand the performance, understand the integration effort, so that we can have a capability a lot quicker than the five-year timeframe.”
The Army currently is focused on identifying non-developmental APS capabilities and fielding them as retrofit kits to Strykers and Abrams tanks as soon as fiscal year 2019.
Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) asked Williamson to outline the acquisition timeline. He then mentioned specifically that Israel has fielded APS technologies in combat. In fact Israel is the only military that has done so. The Trophy APS built by Rafael was fielded by the Israeli Defense Forces aboard its Merkava IV tanks in recent conflicts.
The Army is expected to compare Trophy with the Iron Curtain system developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
The effort is independent of the urgent upgunning of 81 Strykers in Europe from a 12.7mm machine gun to a 30mm turret, an Army spokesman said. Fielding of that increased capability is required by 2018. Both are part of a larger program to modernize the Army’s Strykers to a configuration relevant for the deterrent role they are playing in Europe.
A solicitation was released March 1 for technologies to enhance Stryker performance in several areas, including lethality and protection. The improvements will be applied to both the flat-bottom hull and double v-hull variants, and are not limited to super-sizing the cannon and turret, according to the sources sought document.
“The next round of upgrades is intended to improve the lethality of the Stryker formation, so it’s important to find solutions that work well in concert, and go beyond just making an individual vehicle more lethal,” Col. Glenn Dean, the Army’s project manager for the Stryker Brigade Combat Team, said in a prepared statement. “The team is particularly interested in enhancements that are readily available, such as commercial-off-the-shelf, as well as technologies that will be available in the near-term. We really want to identify technologies and potential contributors that we haven’t specifically looked at yet.”
The solicitation seeks improvements to lethality, survivability, logistics, in vehicle network and communications upgrades, automotive and mechanical enhancements. The deadline for submissions is April 1.
“Though ultimately we’re not going to be limited by technology — we’ll be limited by budget,” said Dean. “We will have to select the best mix of affordable capability consistent with priorities outlined in the Army’s Combat Vehicle Modernization Strategy.”