"Recent guidance from Army senior leadership has us looking at, emphasizing, Bradley replacement," Miller told reporters in a conference call. "What we have now done is moved to accelerate our optionally manned fighting vehicle, the Bradley replacement, and we want to be able to focus on that."
The Army Chief of Staff wants revolutionary new weapons. The Army Secretary wants affordable technology fast. How can they reconcile these opposites?
As threats evolve, the winning model ties digital engineering to manufacturing capacity and a reindustrialized supply chain.
It's important to explore a wide range of options and not lock down requirements too early, Lt. Gen. Walsh said. (By contrast, FCS set precise objectives and only then looked to see if they were possible). "We're trying to solve the problem of what is reconnaissance (and) counter-reconnaissance in the future," he said, not simply replace an old vehicle with a new one.
“If you look back at the Iraq war, one of the most dangerous duties was driving, riding in a convoy between Kuwait City and Baghdad. We lost many, many soldiers, too many soldiers, to IED (roadside bomb) attacks, other attacks on convoys," Esper said. "I could’ve reduced that vulnerability, that sacrifice, (with) unmanned convoys or convoys that were manned by (only) a couple of soldiers.”
"If at some point in future, you need to expand your capability, expand your military," Maj. Gen. Ryan said, "Australia’s at the end of a very long line of industrial resupply, and we might want to have the capacity ourselves."
This week's experiment used a small zoo of specialized systems remote-controlled by humans, each with its own modest niche, working closely with each other and human forces.
On today’s battlefield, mobility isn’t optional - it’s mission-critical.
“Is this possible? Probably,” one retired Army officer told me. “Are the Russians trying to figure out how to disable all the M1s so they can run over us with their robots? I hope that’s where they’re spending their time.”
What mission does the Army really need armed robots for -- expendable scouts, perhaps, or supplementary fire support? And does buying robots for that role really offer more tactical value than spending the same money on mundane upgrades to, say, self-propelled artillery?
The new combat vehicles must be "optimized for fighting in dense urban terrain." Fighting in narrow streets, in turn, requires smaller vehicles than the massive M1 -- and one way to reduce weight is to take the humans out.
"To get a quantum increase in the quality of close combat forces, we can do it in the next two years, (and) the cost compared to the rest of the DoD budget is very small," said retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, who chairs the advisory board for Secretary Mattis's Close Combat Lethality Task Force.
The MQ-9B and Gambit Series represent parallel capabilities that address global challenges for security head-on.
AUSA: American military leaders talk how artificial intelligence will change the face of war, but the unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) actually in development are much more modest and less lethal. They’re mostly small, mostly unarmed, and fall short not only of Pentagon visions of future warfare, but of the tank-like machines the Russians are experimenting with today. […]
A grim vision of future battlefields has the Army urgently exploring every option to streamline its logistics, everything from cargo drones to “compact fusion reactors.” Moving iron mountains of supplies has been a signature strength of the US military since the Civil War. But against an adversary with precision weapons, those sprawling supply dumps, the […]
QUANTICO: A hovercraft that shoots salvoes of rockets. A speedboat that turns into a submarine. A mobile 3D printing factory. A big wooden box with wings (yes, really). And, of course, more drones than you can shake a stick at (because they swarm). These are just a few of the roughly 100 technologies the Marine […]
QUANTICO: Marines at Camp Pendleton will get to field-test more than 50 different new technologies next month ranging from palmtop mini-drones to self-driving amtracs, from wireless networks to precision-guided mortar shells. Plus there will be plenty of classified systems the Marines can’t talk about, including cyber and electronic warfare gear. Technologies that do well may graduate to […]