March 29, 2019 | International, Land
By: Jen Judson
Update: This story has been updated to reflect correct procurement numbers for the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV).
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army has telegraphed its plans to terminate 93 programs and truncate another 93to make room for next-generation technology under ambitious and rapid modernization plans, and the first major programs to feel the ax blows in the next five years are vehicles in the current fleet.
According to fiscal 2020 budget request documents released March 12, the service plans to cut back on upgrade plans for its Bradley Fighting Vehicle program, an aging platform in the fleet currently unable to effectively support technology like active protection systems.
But the Army is also planning to cut not-so-legacy systems as well — the Armored Multipurpose Vehicle (AMPV) built by BAE Systems and the Oshkosh-manufactured Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) — that recently replaced legacy systems, Army Comptroller Lt. Gen. Thomas Horlander said during a March 12 budget briefing with reporters at the Pentagon.
The service has not reached a full-rate production decision for the JLTV. That was pushed back from December 2018 to May 2019 due to new plans to alter the vehicles — to include larger windows and the addition of a muffler — based on soldier feedback.
And the first prototype for AMPV — the M113 personnel carrier replacement — rolled off the line in 2016.
The budget documents lay out the Army's FY20 plans to cut Bradley A4 upgrade plans from 167 vehicles to 128.
The plan is to procure five more sets of Bradley A4 vehicles with one going to pre-positioned stock in Europe and the other four replacing the oldest sets of Bradleys. Then the program will stop around 2023 to make way for the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle, or NGCV, according to Lt. Gen. James Pasquarette, the Army's G-8 chief.
Although the Bradley will be curtailed, Pasquarette noted that its funding in FY20 was up 37 percent from last year at $639 million.
While the Army — as of last year — planned to buy 3,035 JLTVs, it now plans to purchase just 2,530 of the vehicles in FY20.
Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy told an audience at the McAleese & Associates and Credit Suisse Defense Programs conference in Washington on Wednesday that the service would stop at five brigades of Bradley A4 vehicles. That decision, he said, would sync with an investment increase for the NGCV expected in 2023 and beyond.
And while the Army plans to decrease JLTV buys in 2020, cuts will likely not stop there.
McCarthy said the Army is looking to lower the requirement for JLTVs and could soon be locking in a new top-line requirement number.
Yet, Pasquarette also said at the McAleese conference that the top-line requirement would not change for the JLTV but would just be pushed to the right.
McCarthy added that cutting the fleet of JLTVs was justified because the Army has a wealth of vehicles, from 55,000 Humvees, and 49,000 more JLTVs and another 800 Infantry Squad Vehicles planned.
“We clearly have more capability than we need,” he said.
The AMPV buy holds steady in FY20 at 131 vehicles. The FY19 plan shows the Army wanted to buy 130 vehicles. The five-year plan has yet to be released by the Army, but it's likely to show a decline in AMPV buys following FY20.
Pasquarette said the AMPV top-line requirement remains unchanged, but the service was simply slowing the procurement rate per year.
The cuts to current programs were made following painstaking deliberations among Army leadership over the course of last year in a forum dubbed “night court.” Through the process, the service measured current capability against its contribution to increasing capability in a modern, more lethal Army, and it terminated or truncated programs that didn't fit the bill.
Pasquarette noted that the programs that were fully terminated were small ones that did not contribute to the lethality of the future force. Some of the bigger programs were slowed such as the vehicle programs.
Overall, the Army moved an additional $3.6 billion into modernization funding accounts in FY20 over last year's levels — planning to spend $8.6 billion on programs that get after a more modern force. And across the five-year budget plan, the service moved an additional $32 billion to fund modernization efforts beyond what was planned in FY19 for a total of $57 billion.
The Army isn't cutting or slowing all of its legacy vehicle systems, Pasquarette noted.
The Stryker Double V-Hull (DVH-configuration combat vehicles) will get $550 million per year over the next five years to outfit a half of a Stryker brigade combat team annually.
The Abrams tank will receive $1.7 billion in FY20 funding, a 64 percent increase over last year, Pasquarette added.
November 21, 2022 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR
NATO allies may decide to aim to spend more on defence than their current target of 2% of national output when they meet for their next summit in Vilnius in July 2023, the chief of the alliance said on Monday.
October 5, 2020 | International, Aerospace, Naval, Land, C4ISR
Nathan Strout WASHINGTON — The U.S Space Force plans to stand up a new command to oversee all of the service's acquisitions in 2021, although that timeline is dependent on identifying the space-related parts of the other military branches that will be transferred into the nation's newest service. The Space Force announced in June that it will be made up of three field commands — Space Operations Command; Space Training and Readiness Command; and Space Systems Command — with the latter charged with developing, acquiring and sustaining systems for the Space Force. Space Systems Command will oversee both the Space and Missile Systems Center, which currently procures most of the service's space-related platforms, and the Space Rapid Capabilities Office. “We anticipate standing that up in 2021, probably sooner rather than later. We're working on those final details,” Space Force Vice Commander Lt. Gen. David Thompson said during a Defense One event Oct. 1. Notably, Space Systems Command is set to become the new home of the Space Development Agency in October 2022, bringing the ambitious organization under the Space Force's purview. The agency was launched in 2019 and has quickly moved forward with plans to establish a mega-constellation of satellites operating in low Earth orbit. The agency's planned transport layer — a space-based mesh network comprised of satellites connected by optical intersatellite crosslinks — is set to play a major part in the Pentagon's Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept. The new command will act as a unifying force, said Thompson, removing unnecessary duplication between organizations while encouraging healthy competition in some areas. “We're not going to duplicate, but we're certainly interested in the energy that comes from competing ideas and competing designs and competing approaches to a problem,” he explained. Unifying space acquisitions and activities under a single service was a major justification for the establishment of the Space Force. However, details on which organizations, functions and platforms will be absorbed has been scant, as talks continue between the services and Department of Defense leadership. “The absolute final decision hasn't been made,” Thompson said. “We have been engaged in this process for several months now. We're getting close to the decisions that need to be made in terms of transfer of some of those functions and capabilities.” “There is a tremendous amount that the Space Force and the Air Force and the Army and the Navy working together with [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] have already agreed on,” Thompson added. “One is the capabilities and forces that will stay in place where they are to continue to do the activities that are space-related, the set of activities that are prepared to move over; and then there's a couple, there's a few, units and functions left that we haven't reached full agreement on, and we're in the process of finalizing the data and the information that will allow the decision-makers to decide the final disposition — whether they'll stay or whether they'll move to the Space Force.” The Space Force largely completed this process with the Air Force in the spring, said Thompson, with 23 units or functions selected for transition into the new service. Much of the planning and execution of that transfer has already been completed, and the Space Force has gone on to identify other organizations and capabilities that should be brought into their fold, including two Air Force units and two more from the intelligence community. Plans are expected to be finalized for the other services in the near future, with Thompson teasing that an announcement was likely before the end of the year. “The target that the leadership in the DoD has given us is we want to be able to make decisions so that we can execute planning in FY2021 and begin facilitating moves in 2022,” he explained. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/space/2020/10/01/the-space-force-to-establish-new-acquisitions-command-in-202
July 21, 2023 | International, Aerospace, C4ISR
US 4th Fleet is setting up the second unmanned systems hub for the Navy, and showcased its early work in UNITAS 2023.