WASHINGTON — The Army is just days away from requesting proposals for prototypes for its new Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher (CAML) program, with the goal of awarding a Other Transaction Agreement by the end of this year, the service’s chief technology officer told Breaking Defense.
The request for prototype proposals, or RFPP, is set to be released at the end of this month or beginning of next month, CTO Alex Miller said in an interview Wednesday.
By now the Army had originally hoped to have issued two CAML contracts, but Miller said the timeline was pushed back to bring in more nontraditional, commercial vendors and to make the set-up of the launcher more agile and flexible.
“How do you bring together folks like a weapon system integrator, a munitions palette and an autonomous platform provider, so that we aren’t trying to ask one company who probably isn’t good at those things individually to try to do the things they’re not good at,” he said. “We are really serious about bringing the team together so that it looks and feels like Legos, where the best athlete is doing the thing they’re really good at.”
As part of that effort, the Army is now looking for three or four vendors instead of the original two, Miller told Breaking Defense last month. And as Breaking Defense also previously reported, one vendor would likely be in charge of a medium sized launcher and one would be responsible for a larger launcher.
With more vendors, the Army is aiming to create a “teams of teams” approach, Miller said. Such a model has already been used by the service with its Next Generational Command and Control program, where there’s not one lead on the initiative, but multiple vendors working together.
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But it’s not exactly clear how such an arrangement will work for the CAML program, especially for the two sizes of the launcher, Miller said.
Still, the Army is on schedule to have vendors show off prototypes around the mid- to late-summer timeframe, and for the Army to make an OTA agreement, which are often used for prototype awards, in the later part of the year, Miller said.
‘Whatever The Mission Demands’
Apart from the idea to move to a larger team of vendors, the service also wanted to rework the CAML program because the path that it was on “locked” the Army into fire control systems “rather than providing an actual autonomous launcher that we could reconfigure on the fly,” Miller said.
“The goal is having an autonomous platform that we could rapidly roll on and roll off aircraft if we need to, but also have swappable, palletized munitions. So rather than just saying, ‘Hey, you know, the company that owns this fire control, they get to pick whatever weapon goes on there.’ That is not the objective. The objective is whatever the mission demands,” Miller said.
“If it’s a HIMARS, we put a HIMARS on it. If it’s something like a Blackbeard, we put a Blackbeard on it,” he added.
Though the Army is reworking the way it will carry out the CAML program, the service isn’t totally starting from scratch, Miller said.
“There’s been a lot of good science and research and development, but [we want] to change the approach to really focus on, ‘Hey, what’s that autonomous mobility platform? What is the munitions palette, and what are those interfaces for power and data?’ And then, ‘Who are the weapon systems integrators that can put their palletized munition on top of that autonomous vehicle,” Miller said.