Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) wants the top Defense Department acquisition official to examine the Army’s recent proposal to terminate the Lockheed Martin [LMT] Autonomous Navigation System (ANS).
In an Aug. 11 letter to Ashton Carter, undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, Bartlett said, “…the cancellation of the ANS program is short-sighted and a true example of throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.”
The ANS kit consists of mission sensors, software and processors, executing the auto-driver functions such as navigation, perception and mobility planning. An applique system, it could be integrated into any unmanned ground vehicle.
At the same time, Bartlett does not take issue with the proposed cancellation of the Lockheed Martin Multi-Mission Unmanned Ground Vehicle (MM-UGV) program and the Common Mobility Platform. Congress was recently notified of all three proposed terminations.
Terminating the three systems did not require Carter’s approval due to their acquisition category that does not require his oversight. However, Bartlett said in his memo Carter’s staff has championed robotics across DoD for several years.
Bartlett’s stated concern is with the Army’s rationale for canceling ANS, which he said is “based on a flawed Red Team assessment that took only three weeks and presents its findings in 15 pages.”
Bartlett, who chairs the Air and Land Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, would like Carter’s staff to “do an assessment of the Army’s Red Team results to determine whether the Army’s decision to terminate ANS is in the best interest of the warfighter and the taxpayer.”
The Army made the proposed termination decisions following the 2011 UGV Capability Portfolio Review, which “discerned that commercial navigation technologies out-paced ANS development as part of MM-UGV” (Defense Daily, Aug. 3).
While the service believes it has no requirement for ANS and that it could pursue commercial automotive-based ANS-like solutions for military robotics, he said, “In fact, there is no commercial alternative that has been tested in a tactical environment and meets military specifications.”
Additionally, there are a number of formal requirements documents in the pipeline for unmanned ground vehicles, Bartlett said. As the Army Red Team noted, JIEDDO has an urgent requirement for a Counter-IED robotic platform that would rely on ANS to do its job. Moreover, Bartlett said the Army’s recent actions would seem to indicate “an abandonment of continued investment in robotic systems” and put the U.S. military “decades” behind in fielding tactical UGVs.
The Army in 2003 began ANS development and has invested $247 million through fiscal year 2011 in the program, Bartlett’s memo said. The Army requested $51 million for ANS in the FY 2012 president’s budget request.
Bartlett believes the service should invest the FY ’12 funding to complete ANS development. “Committing to completing the ANS, rather than terminating ANS would yield a technical data package for a production-ready system and give the Army and option for future UGV efforts.”