This is not what the Army’s next-generation vehicle will look like. The ground-pounders throw it out there as a “generic representation,” but they don’t have any stated preferences. However you want to design the Ground Combat Vehicle, the Army says, design it that way.
This weekend, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff, traveled to suburban Detroit, the heart of auto-manufacturing country, to tell industry what it wants from the long-awaited Ground Combat Vehicle, one of the service’s highest acquisition priorities. He’s got list of priorities he calls his “Big Four,” Chiarelli said: “force protection, capacity, full-spectrum operations, timing — all based on the immediate need of size, weight and power.”
You read that right. The Ground Combat Vehicle is a relatively blank canvas. Does it have to have treads or wheels? What kind of gun should it have, if any at all? How fast should it go? What kind of communications capabilities? The answer: Shrug. Up to you, buddy.
Check the Request For Proposals — that is, the solicitation for potential contractors to design the vehicle — issued in late November and you’ll see those Big Four are outlined fairly generically. It’s got to withstand blasts from homemade bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. It’s got to carry a “fully-equipped nine soldier Infantry squad,” plus vehicle crew. It’s got to be useful on missions ranging from counterinsurgency (unlike the Abrams tank) to state-on-state land warfare (unlike the Humvee or MRAP), as well as plugging in “configuration changes of armor and network” as time wears on. Then there’s the most concrete requirement of all, the one where the Army isn’t playing around: it’s got to be in the Army’s hands seven years after the contract for it gets issued.
Chiarelli, in Dearborn, threw in another one: “All of this should be achieved without exceeding a contract ceiling of $450 million dollars.” In this age of tighter contracting rules and constrained budgets, the Army doesn’t want to spend more than $10 million per vehicle on a fleet of 1,800 Ground Combat Vehicles. Fears of going way, way over budget and jeopardizing the vehicle of the future prompted the Army to rip up its previous solicitation in August and go back to the drawing board. After Defense Secretary Robert Gates got rid of all the vehicles in the Army’s old Future Combat Systems modernization plan in 2009 — they were too costly and not clearly technologically feasible — it was probably a prudent move.
So what will the Ground Combat Vehicle ultimately look like? We won’t have to wait long to know. Potential contractors have until January 21 to submit proposals. The Army wants to pick a winning design by April.
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