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Rheinmetall Lynx

WASHINGTON: The Rheinmetall Lynx’s second attempt to replace the aging M2 Bradley could go much better than the first. Why? The Army has changed what it wants in its future Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle competition.

Two years ago, when the KF41 Lynx made its US debut, Army officials feared the German vehicle was too heavy and too unproven to replace the Reagan-era Bradley. Since then, the Army has rebooted the OMFV program to allow heavier armor and more development time. In parallel, the Lynx has been winning over allies from Hungary to Australia. A foreign vehicle is still a hard sell for the US Army, but these developments definitely improve the odds.

So far, Rheinmetall’s US subsidiary, American Rheinmetall Vehicles is the first and only firm to publicly commit to the new competition. We know that the German parent company, its American partners Textron and Raytheon, and the US Army have all done things that improve the Lynx’s chances in any likely competition in three main arenas: weight, maturity, and automation.

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The turreted variant of the Rheinmetall Lynx

Weight: From Air Transport To Polish Bridges

The KF41 Lynx was the heaviest OMFV contender when it was displayed for the first time at AUSA 2018. It maxed out at 55 tons with all possible uparmor kits, slimming down only to 35 tons when stripped to its minimum weight for air transport. At the conference, the Army’s Next Generation Combat Vehicle director, Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman, emphasized that “the idea is we have a smaller vehicle that is lighter, but survivable, [not] really big and heavy.”

Five months later, in March 2019, the Army released a requirement that a single Air Force C-17 should be able to transport two of OMFVs. That put a strict upper limit on the vehicle’s weight – while, at the same time, the Army demanded heavy armor.

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A soldier exits the Lynx

In fact, the warring requirements were so at odds that nobody proved able to meet them, with the Army swiftly rejecting the only company that submitted a prototype for testing, General Dynamics. That left precisely zero competitors for OMFV.

So in January 2020, the Army cancelled the competition and declared it would reboot the OMFV program. Officials publicly admitted the requirements and schedule were unrealistic and humbly solicited industry’s input on the art of the possible. Then the service released new desired “characteristics” – not formal, mandatory requirements – that unequivocally made survivability, including armor, the top priority and eliminated any mention of fitting two OMFVs on one C-17. While weight remained a concern, the focus shifted to crossing Polish bridges and other rickety infrastructure in Eastern Europe.

Meanwhile, as Rheinmetall refined its design, its published materials on Lynx gave a narrower and slightly lighter weight range than we’d heard in 2018. “Modular scalable armour packages [are] available,” one pamphlet says, “starting with a mass of only 34 tonnes in a peacekeeping [configuration], all the way to 50 tonnes” – about 37.5 to 55.1 US tons – which is well within the capacity of typical Eastern European bridges. In fact, Lynx is light enough that one Eastern European country decided to buy it: Hungary.

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Rheinmetall offers a family of Lynx variants tailored to different customers’ demands.

Maturity: Hungary & Australia Advance, the US Slows Down

In 2018, the KF41 Lynx was brand-new and the Army was in a hurry, aiming to field OMFVs to combat units by 2026. “We have a pretty challenging test schedule, [so] we really can’t afford a clean-sheet design,” said then-program manager Col. James Schirmer.

Now, Rheinmetall had already built a working prototype by that point, using proven components from its previous vehicles: Puma’s transmission, PzH 2000’s tracks, Kodiak’s power electronics, Boxer’s nuclear and biochem filtration, etc. But the vehicle as a whole hadn’t gone through government testing or won actual contracts yet. That made the Lynx look riskier than its competitors, which were either proven vehicles or derived from them.

The Army ramped up the time pressure even more by demanding that competitors deliver a full-up working prototype – built entirely at their own expense – for testing by Oct. 1st, 2019. Of all the companies that had expressed interest, only General Dynamics delivered a vehicle on time.

After the Army rebooted the program, it decided it had asked for too much, too fast. The revised schedule pushed back fielding by two years, to 2028. Instead of demanding a full-up prototype right away for free, the Army will first ask for paper proposals in 2021, then pay up to five competitors to develop “initial digital designs” by 2023. Up to three entrants can win contracts to build prototypes by 2025, with the winner entering production in 2027. That gives companies much more time, funding and feedback to refine their designs.

The Army’s gentler schedule made Lynx’s unproven status less of an issue – at the same time that Lynx was proving itself to other nations. In 2019, the Rheinmetall Lynx and the Korean-made Hanwha AS21 Redback advanced to the final round of Australia’s US $10 billion competition for a new armored troop carrier, Project Land 400 Phase 3 (the Australians will pick a winner in 2022). Then, this year, Hungary placed the first order for Lynx, paying US $2.4 billion for 218 Lynx Infantry Fighting Vehicle variants and nine support vehicles, plus assorted spares and support.

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Variant Lynx configurations

The Hungarian deal also showed how Rheinmetall can work with local firms. While the first 46 Lynxs will be built in Germany, the next 172 will be manufactured by a joint venture in Hungary. Similarly, Rheinmetall’s Australian branch has set up a Military Vehicle Centre of Excellence (MILVEHCOE) to design, develop, and manufacture vehicles and equipment locally in Queensland.

“The transfer of technology is one area that Rheinmetall really excels at, and I think you see that in the win in Hungary and MILVEHCOE in Australia,” the managing director of the company’s US subsidiary, American Rheinmetall’s Matt Warnick, said in an interview with Breaking Defense. “There’s a good opportunity for Team Lynx to help grow production capabilities for ground combat vehicles in the US and to add jobs for US workers.”

For the US competition, Rheinmetall is partnered with two American firms: Raytheon, which will provide much of the electronics in any US version, and Textron, which will build the vehicle itself at its Slidell, La. factory.

Slidell currently builds a 4×4 combat vehicle, known in US service as the M1117 Armored Security Vehicle. The Army’s bought more than 3,000, with almost 1,500 more in service with Afghanistan, Iraq, Colombia and Canada. While the wheeled, lightweight M1117 is smaller and simpler than Lynx, it does give Textron significant experience in armored vehicle manufacture, and the company has started expanding the Slidell facility.

But there’s another part of Textron that’s at least as important to Lynx’s chances in US: its recently acquired subsidiary Howe & Howe, which builds robots.

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Textron Ripsaw M5 unmanned mini-tank

Automation: Textron Robots & Raytheon Architecture

While the timeline and requirements are more manageable for OMFV this second time around, in one important aspect, the Army has made one part of the competition harder. It wants sufficient automation that the vehicle can fight with just two human soldiers at the controls.

That’s one less than the M2 Bradley, the existing variants of the Rheinmetall Lynx, or almost any modern Infantry Fighting Vehicles, which generally have a crew of three. The Army now believes that automated targeting and obstacle-avoidance systems can allow two humans to do the work of two.

Can industry deliver this much automation? The Army thinks so, largely because of its own recent experiments with remote-controlled vehicles and industry’s impressive offerings for next-generation Robotic Combat Vehicles. One of the RCV variants the Army has bought for experimentation, the Ripsaw mini-tank, is built by Howe & Howe, a subsidiary of Textron since December 2018.

“They’ve been crucial to our robotics work,” Textron Systems VP Ed Smith told me. “We will bring a lot out of the RCV experimentation into Team Lynx.”

Howe & Howe’s robotics expertise is a big addition, and it comes when the Army has doubled down on its desire for automation in OMFV. (The vehicle was always supposed to operate by remote control at least part of the time, but it was originally expected to require three crew in actual combat).

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Rheinmetall has designed Lynx to easily swap components, converting one variant to another within hours.

The Army also wants OMFV to be easy to upgrade, with what’s called a Modular Open Systems Architecture (MOSA) that can plug and play new technology from any vendor that meets certain common standards. Allied customers like Hungary and Australia are driving Rheinmetall in this direction as well. The Lynx is designed to allow mechanics to swap out key components like the turret, converting an infantry carrier to (for example) a mobile command post in less than three hours.

But Rheinmetall’s biggest modularity advantage for the US market is its partnership with Raytheon, which already provides electronics and sensors for a host of US military systems, from artillery fire controls to F-35 Joint Strike Fighter sensors.

“We have, obviously, experience working these broader MOSA-related issues across multiple programs,” said Raytheon’s OMFV director, Brad Barnard. What’s more, he told me, “we’ve worked with the Army on several combat vehicle modernization efforts, [and] there’s been an open architecture dimension to many of them.”

That ability to upgrade the vehicle over its service life is a crucial and underappreciated aspect of OMFV. The Army’s spent four decades upgrading the Bradley without replacing it. When the replacement finally arrives – whoever builds it — it will have to stay up to date for decades to come.