Land Warfare

Army planning hybrid tactical vehicle tests next year

After testing hybrid Bradley Fighting Vehicles, the Army will test hybrid Humvees and JLTVs.

By Andrew Eversden on October 12, 2022 8:51 am
JLTV Maneuvers Over Rocks
Driving through off-road obstacles showcases the Joint Light Tactical Vehicles’ capabilities to maneuver over uneven surfaces at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin, Aug. 17, 2022. (Spc. Brittney Joy/US Army)

AUSA 2022 — The US Army has a series of hybrid electric vehicle testing events scheduled for next year as it seeks to take advantage of the operational and environmental promise of the green technology.

While the service has been testing a hybrid-electric Bradley Fighting Vehicle this year, the Army’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office has contracts in place to integrate hybrid-electric technology on to a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle.

Driving the effort is the Army’s climate strategy, which aims to field “purpose-built” hybrid-drive tactical vehicles by 2035 and fully electric hybrid vehicles by 2050. The plan also aims to reduce the service’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent of its 2005 levels by 2030.

Once RCCTO turned on its hybrid electric Bradley back in January, the Army began testing the first vehicle in July at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. with additional testing planned in September in Yuma, Ariz., a RCCTO spokesperson said in a statement. The second hybrid Bradley began testing in Yuma in August and both vehicles will be done with testing in December, the spokesperson said.

RELATED: Racing to ‘adapt,’ Army estimates climate plan will cost over $6.8B over 5 years

As the Bradley work ramped up earlier this year, the Army also awarded prototype Other Transaction Agreement contracts to begin hybridizing two other workhorse vehicles in its fleet, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and Humvees. According to the spokesperson, the contracts were awarded in March.

Both programs have the same set of goals. The first is to demonstrate the feasibility of hybrid electric power on tactical wheeled vehicles, in order to reduce the Army’s reliance on fossil fuels, a key component of the climate strategy. The second goal is to generate more organic power on-board, in order to power integrated weapon systems, sensors or other electronic equipment.

“In addition to being able to generate and store additional power, the … [vehicles] will also add an additional operational capability that will enable it to operate in a silent mobility mode (battery only),” the spokesperson said. “This additional on board power storage will also increase the… [hybrid vehicles’] silent watch capability over the non-hybrid variant.”

The hybrid Humvee OTAs, awarded to Gale Banks Engineering in Azusa, Calif. and Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Mich., run for 18 months. RCCTO said that testing will begin in September 2023 and finish in December next year.

AM General, the maker of the Humvee, is also expected to announce its own hybrid electric Humvee at some point this year, specifically targeting National Guard units.

“If any vehicle fleet in the US Army should be electrified in some fashion first, I think it should be the Humvee,” AM General CEO James Cannon told Breaking Defense in June. “You know why? It’s a utility vehicle, it’s not a combat vehicle.”

The hybrid JLTV effort is being led by MATBOCK, LLC., a small business company located in Virginia Beach, Va. According to the statement, the hybrid electric JLTV is a 15-month project, with testing beginning in June 2023 and finishing in September that year.

Major milestones for both programs include finishing the design reviews, vehicle builds, integration and facility checkouts, contractor testing and soldier testing, according to RCCTO.

“The intent of the Soldier Touch Points are to bring in Soldiers early into the projects life cycle to assist with informing requirements, provide operator and maintainer feedback on design decisions, and to ensure that we are building a prototype that provides an increase to the overall operational capability and functionality over the non-hybrid platform variant,” the spokesperson said.

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AUSA 2022

Over at Rheinmetall's booth sat the hefty Lynx OMFV (Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle). The company, as its competitors, is hoping to make a strong impression as the Army looks for OMFV proposals later this fall -- the early stage of an almost certainly lucrative long-term contract award. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
All the way from down under, the Australian firm Defendtex presented some of its modular UAVs. Here visitors can see the Drone155, which the company says can be outfitted with ISR payloads or explosives. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The MVPP from Globe Tech stands for Modular Vehicle Protection Platform, a vehicle add-on that can take the brunt of improvised explosive device detonations. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
AUSA was well attended by international officers and officials as well, and by foreign defense firms. The Korean booth, shown here, featured some products hoping to make a splash in the US military. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Not your traditional defense contractor, the computing giant IBM has a booth at AUSA showing off its flashy but functional quantum computer. The US government as a whole, and the Pentagon in particular, are heavily invested in the quantum computing race with the likes of China. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Among the fleet of vehicles parked throughout the AUSA floor for display was the Flyer 72-U, made by General Dynamics. The company says the vehicle takes a "modular approach" so it can be configured for anything from "light strike assault" to rescue and evacuation. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The stuff of counter-UAS nightmares, the Virginia-based BlueHalo firm makes drone swarms that use AI and machine learning to provide battlefield intelligence to soldiers. The Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office awarded the company $14 million in February to develop the HIVE. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
It's a .50 caliber Gatling gun, one that Dillon Aero says can fire 1,500 shots per minute, or 25 rounds per second. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
For this year's show AM General rolled its own Humvee Saber, Blade Edition, onto the floor. The company claims "leap-ahead" technology for a light tactical vehicle. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Patria, a defense firm owned jointly by Finland and Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, made it's way across the Atlantic for AUSA 2022, bringing along its AMV multi-role vehicle. The AMV was recently purchased by the dozens by Slovakia and its home country of Finland. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
At the Pratt Miller Defense booth, visitors will see a full-sized Expeditionary Modular Autonomous Vehicle (EMAV) is the "newest and perhaps most mobile and lethal" of the company's autonomous offerings. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Marathon's Autonomous Robot Targets are exactly what that sounds like: shooting targets guided by computer code and designed to "look, move, and even behave like people," the company says. The robots were on the move on the AUSA floor -- though no shooting was allowed. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The AUSA show floor offered a fresh look at a futuristic version of an old Army standby: the Abrams tank. This one, the Abrams X, is made by General Dynamics Land Systems, manufacturers of the current Abrams M1A1 and M1A2 battle tanks used by the US Army. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
Attendees may walk by model versions of the famous Iron Dome system, in use for years in Israel, and its sister SkyCeptor system, both made by Rafael. The SkyCeptor, in particular, is meant to "defeat short- to medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles and other advanced air defense threats," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
As the need for counter-UAS systems explodes, Epirus is at AUSA repping its counter-electronics system Stryker Leonidas, made with General Dynamics. The system's "counter-swarm" weapon "fills a pressing short range air defense (SHORAD) capability gap," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
A new unveiling for AUSA, Rheinmetall announced this week the Mission Master CXT platform, the newest addition to the company's "family" of autonomous ground vehicles. The company says the CXT "combines the power of a diesel engine with a silent electric motor." (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
The GMC Hummer EV Platform, the first vehicle on GM's New Ultium EV Platform, goes on display at AUSA 2022. All-electric offerings are the center of much of the Army's attention these days as it aims to electrify its non-tactical, and eventually tactical, fleet. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Two new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles (AMPV) sit at the booth by Bae Systems. The vehicles are meant to replace the Army's venerable, but old M113s. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Palantir shows off its prototype for the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) vehicle. The company says the TITAN "will be the critical backbone that provides correlation, fusion, and integration of sensor data alongside insights from AI/ML overlaid at the tactical edge." In other words, it's meant to find the signal in the noise. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
A model of a "modernized" Boeing Apache AH-64E shown Association of US Army Conference in 2022. While the Army is about to choose two new airframes, there's currently no Apache replacement on the horizon. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
Lockheed Martin teamed up with Sikorsky to produce the Raider X, the team's competitor in the Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, one of two high-profile Army Future Vertical Lift contests currently underway. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The Bell 360 Invictus is the other FARA competitor, looking to beat out the Lockheed-Sikorsky team. The Army's expected to make its decision in fiscal 2024. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The defense start-up Anduril has expanded its footprint in the defense market in recent years. This product, the Mobile Sentry, "brings autonomous fixed site counter UAS and counter intrusion capabilities into a mobile form factor," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)
The military's no-so-furry friendly robot dogs are back at AUSA this year. This model, called the Vision 60 Q-UGV from Ghost Robotics, is an "all-weather ground robot for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).
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