Page 58 - Australian Defence Mag March 2020

58 DEFENCE BUSINESS VIEW FROM CANBERRA
MARCH 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
TIMING IS EVERYTHING
How good could it have been if the Army’s new Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) just happened to be the same as what the US Army chooses to replace its large fleet of elderly Bradleys.
A SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT | CANBERRA
FOR aircraft, this commonality has worked well – Australia op- erates vastly smaller fleets of Super Hornets, Growlers, C-17s, C-130Js and Seahawk Romeos than the US but benefits from support, upgrades and much more funded by the US taxpayer for the US military and which flow on to our platforms.
Could this have worked for the new IFVs set to be acquired through project Land 400 Phase 3? The answer seems to be, in theory, maybe, a bit.
The US has long been thinking about a replacement for the Bradleys which were first fielded in 1981 and did sterling service in the Kuwait and Iraq wars.
More than 6,000 were produced. But even with upgrades, the platform is increasingly outmatched by current and emerging threats.
Three programs have come and gone, including the lat- est that was supposed to deliver around 3,800 very ad- vanced Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicles (OMFV) to US warfighters.
That would be a vehicle which, where deemed necessary, could be operated robotically or autonomously. Development of this capability presented all the same challenges facing driverless cars, with the added complications that these ve-
LEFT: The M113s might have a future as unmanned platforms.
hicles would be operating off-road while being shot at.
The project was canned in mid-Jan- uary after just one company, General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS), submitted a vehicle for evaluation.
What had been planned was a pro- totyping competition from which two designs would have been shortlisted for further evaluation and ultimately selection of a winner.
With just one contender, this was hardly going to be a contest so the US Army called a halt, with a view to revisiting requirements, acquisition strategy and schedule. The Army ac- knowledged they sought a great deal of capability on a very aggressive sched- ule which was too much for industry.
This process paralleled Land 400 Phase 3, which has proceeded through initial evaluation of four con- tenders to a short list of two, with the trials program now under way.
The contenders are the Hanwha Redback and Rheinmetall Lynx, both touted as possible contenders for the US Army. Hanwha chose not to compete, as did BAE Systems, manufacturer of the Bradleys. Rhe- inmetall was to compete but didn’t make it to the start line.
GDLS did but the US Army won’t say if it was compliant. GDLS unsuccessfully submitted its new Ajax IFV as a con- tender Land 400 Phase 3.
US publication defensenews.com noted that the US Army set out some 100 mandatory requirements for the new ve- hicle, whereas Land 400 Phase 3 laid out just five.
So, did the US Army just waste much of two years on a project with requirements which industry really had no hope of meeting in the time allowed? You would have to think so, though you would also hope that everyone learned some use- ful stuff along the way.
So it seems we will acquire a new modern IFV ahead of the US.
On the plus side for the US Army, at least their Brad- leys are a whole lot younger than the Vietnam-era M-113 Armoured personnel Carriers which Land 400 Phase 3 aims to replace.
Fortunately for Australian soldiers there were alternatives, the Bushmaster and ASLAV wheeled vehicles which per- formed well in Afghanistan and Iraq. The last time the Army used M-113s operationally was in East Timor when the only opponents were lightly equipped militia forces.