OMFV: Army’s Bradley Replacement Faces Hill, DoD Skeptics

WASHINGTON: With at least five industry teams submitting proposals, the Army’s rebooted Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program has passed one hurdle that doomed its predecessor: getting enough competitors. But, multiple experts warn, the service still must convince Congress and the Biden Administration that a new heavily armed and armored infantry carrier – in many ways optimized for Eastern Europe – will be relevant to the Pacific.

Even within the Army, OMFV must compete against more obvious counter-China weapons like long-range missiles, high-speed aircraft and air & missile defense. The Army’s budget as a whole is under pressure to fund more air and naval forces for the Pacific: No less a figure than former Army Chief of Staff and current Joint Chiefs Chairman, Gen. Mark Milley, have warned of a budgetary “bloodletting” for the land service.  Despite OMFV’s emphasis on electronics and automation, it’s hard to sell $46 billion worth of new ground combat vehicles as revolutionary tech when you’re competing with armed robots, hypersonic missiles and drone-killing lasers.

“The budget situation [and] the ghosts of past failed Army acquisitions …do not bode well for the OMFV,” said AEI’s Bill Greenwalt, a longtime skeptic of the Army’s acquisition bureaucracy. “Historically, large Army programs have been plagued by plans to incentivize the creation of items that are just slightly better than what is currently in inventory, take decades to get there, and then are ultimately cancelled or scaled back.  OFMV is likely to head down this path without a major cultural shift.”

The Army’s current Infantry Fighting Vehicle, the M2 Bradley, was designed in the 1970s, entered production in 1980, and has been repeatedly upgraded since, to the point that the chassis, engine, and electrical system are getting overloaded. The Army has at least three cancelled programs they tried and failed to develop a replacement:

• the Future Combat Systems, awarded to Boeing and SAIC;
• the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), for which BAE Systems and General Dynamics competed;
• and the initial attempt at OMFV back in 2019, for which General Dynamics was the only bidder.

By contrast, the rebooted OMFV program – with a more realistic schedule and less stringent demands on industry – got at least five bids this month. The competing teams’ prime contractors include the usual suspects, BAE Systems (which makes the Bradley) and General Dynamics (which makes the M1 Abrams), but also two foreign firms, Germany’s Rheinmetall and Korea’s Hanwha (teamed with Oshkosh), and even a small business, Michigan-based Mettle Ops.

Admittedly, the barriers to entry are much lower this time around: The current contenders are just submitting digital concepts, with physical prototypes not due until a later phase of the program that starts in 2023. And the Army can make up to five concept awards, meaning all five contenders can participate in this phase. But the Army can still take heart in how its new approach has gotten a more robust industry response than previous programs.

“A year ago there was rightful skepticism of the OMFV’s future,” said Guy Swan, a former armor officer now with the Association of the US Army. “This program is now back on track, has solid leadership, and a realistic game plan – all of which is built on a strong Army-Industry partnership…. Now we need Congress to provide the resources to bring this program to reality for our soldiers.

“Clearly, there are challenges ahead,” Swan acknowledged in an email interview. “But the fact that so many bidders have come forward for this second round of the OMFV program solicitation indicates that industry leaders feel some significant level of confidence in the program and the congressional support it will receive.”

In particular, Swan said, “the number of companies and their geographic locations ensures that Congress will take note of the number of jobs involved, especially during the post-COVID 19 economic recovery.” BAE’s vehicle factory is in Pennsylvania, GD’s in Ohio, Oshkosh’s in Wisconsin; Mettle Ops is in Michigan, although it would need to find a larger partner to actually build prototypes, while Rheinmetall is still picking a US location.

But are all these companies genuine contenders in the Army’s eyes?

“The number of competitors is a positive,” agreed Greenwalt, “but one has to question whether the Army is really serious about ever moving beyond its current industrial base, in this case BAE and GD…. Bidders beyond the ground systems duopoly may need to be highly suspicious as to whether the Army can break from its past record of awards.”

“Hanwha, Rheinmetall and particularly MettleOps may eventually only be there for window dressing,” Greenwalt warned, “essentially serving the same function that Karem Aircraft and AVX did on FARA.” That’s the Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft, where the Army included small businesses in awards for early designs but whittled it down to aerospace stalwarts Bell and Sikorsky for actual prototypes.

The Hard Part

Even if the Army manages the OMFV program well, it faces an uphill battle to sell the program.

“While the additional offerors help the acquisition strategy, the fundamental problems of budget constraints and strategic focus on China make OMFV’s future challenging,” CSIS scholar Mark Cancian told me. “The program does not align well with a China and Pacific-focused strategy. Although OMFV is high in the Army priorities, it will have a hard time gaining traction with the strategists in OSD [the Office of the Secretary of Defense]. They will give priority to long-range strike capabilities.

“The Army budget will be squeezed and there will be intense competition for modernization dollars,” Cancian said. “OMFV will need to compete with all [35] Army development programs and is not mature enough to have developed a broad coalition in Congress.”

But convincing Congress isn’t the hard part here, argued Tom Spoehr, a retired Army three-star now with the Heritage Foundation: It’s the Biden Administration appointees in OSD, especially the veterans of Obama-era cuts.

“I think Congress would be willing to give the Army the benefit of the doubt and support the OMFV program, especially given the robust responses to the RFP [Request For Proposals],” Spoehr told me. “Armored vehicle production easily translates to manufacturing jobs – unlike AI or networks – which is always attractive to Congress.”

“The bigger problem,” he went on, “[is] the Biden administration is bringing back many of the same people who were disposed to make cuts to the Army in the 2014 timeframe, and it will be an uphill battle to convince them that great power competition— including against China—is a global competition that will not just be fought [in] the Western Pacific.”

“In 2014, these new Biden nominees were of the opinion that if America declared that the Army would not be sized or equipped for stability operations, that the rest of the world would similarly agree not to challenge the U.S. in a way that required those type of forces and capabilities,” Spoehr snarked. “The world is never so forgiving.”