WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army plans to take another year to pick an Active Protection System for its Stryker combat vehicle, according to the military deputy to the Army acquisition chief.
The service is already fielding the Rafael-made Trophy APS on its Abrams tank and has picked IMI’s Iron Fist for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle — both as interim systems until the Army can develop an advanced future system — but it had to go back to square one when its attempt to outfit Stryker with Herndon, Virginia-based Artis LLC’s Iron Curtain system failed.
Iron Curtain is out as possible active protection system for Stryker
After an extensive evaluation, the Army has chosen to take Artis LLC's Iron Curtain active protection system out of the running for an interim solution for the Stryker combat vehicle.
The Army put out a request for possible systems to be qualified as an interim solution on the Stryker. Officials ultimately chose a Rafael and DRS team and a Rheinmetall and UBT team to participate in a live-fire rodeo last November to see if either system might work.
But while it was believed a decision would come soon after, Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski testified at an April 2 Senate Armed Services Airland Subcommittee hearing that it would take another year to make a decision.
“We have two companies that are in the process of competing for [APS on Stryker]. One is a venture between … Rafael and DRS and the other is Rheinmetall and UBT, so we are in the process of going through that,” Ostrowski said. “It’s going to take about a year, quite frankly, in order to put those systems on the vehicles, characterize them and make a determination as to whether or not to move forward with either one of the two vendors.”
Rheinmetall intensifies push to enter US Army’s vehicle protection program
The company’s marketing effort this week at its Germany-based proving grounds comes as potential fiscal 2018 funding would cover the qualification of another APS for Army combat vehicles waiting in the wings for congressional approval.
Ostrowski added the service had asked each team to provide blueprints and to build their non-developmental APS systems to fit on Stryker. “They are in the process of doing that build,” he said.
“And once the build is put on the vehicle, it’s then a matter of testing in order to ensure that it works,” Ostrowski said, which is not unlike the process the Army went through to characterize and qualify APS systems on both Abrams and Bradley.
Israeli company Rafael and DRS submitted its Trophy VPS — a lighter version of Trophy — for the rodeo. Germany-based Rheinmetall partnered with Unified Business Technologies, based in Michigan, and submitted its Active Defense System — now renamed StrikeShield.
During the rodeo, participants did not perform a full installation of their systems on the vehicle. Instead, they set up test rigs in front of Strykers or hung their system off a Stryker in the evaluation.
Following the rodeo, the idea was to select one, possibly two systems, to begin some sort of installation characterization on a platform deemed most appropriate for the APS system, Col. Glenn Dean, the Army’s Stryker program manager who is also in charge of the interim APS effort, told Defense News in October 2018.
Meanwhile, Ostrowski said the Army bought 88 Iron Fist systems for Bradley in 2019 and planned to buy another 36 in the FY20 budget. The service is on a path to field four brigades of Abrams with Trophy by FY21.
The Army is also developing its own Modular Active Protection System, which is seen more like a digital integrated backbone that will be designed with an open-system architecture so that vendors can bring radars, optical sensors and hard- or soft-kill effectors and plug them in, according to Ostrowski.
US Army to bring new vehicle protection technologies to fleet as early as 2020
The Army is looking into the future of vehicle protection, with plans to pursue laser-warning systems, reactive armor tiles and signature management solutions.
The important thing is “to get a capability out there first. . . . Now it’s just a matter of moving beyond that,” he said.
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