What the Army is planning for its vehicle-protection push

The U.S. Army wants to pursue a more layered approach to protecting combat vehicles and formations, a step away from the singular push over the last decade to outfit them with active protection systems, Army officials in charge of ground combat modernization told Defense News.

Army Futures Command has been working on a Formation Layered Protection requirement and is releasing what it calls a “characteristics of need” statement to industry, Col. Kevin Bradley, the Next-Generation Combat Vehicle Cross-Functional Team lead within AFC, said in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week.

Bradley’s team, along with Program Executive Office Ground Combat Systems, is using the AUSA forum to discuss the needs statement with industry and seek feedback.

The Army is looking for ways to protect dismounted soldiers, vehicles and full formations from a variety of threats. Potential approaches include masking vehicles or hardening them with both active and passive protection tactics. And the service will determine what is “the optimal mix for a formation to protect itself and those around it,” Bradley said.

The service has been focused on chasing after interim active protection systems with varied success. The Army outfitted some M1 Abrams tanks with Rafael’s Trophy APS and sent them to Europe. While the capability — which has been in theater over the past four years — does offer protection, there are tradeoffs like the extra weight of the system.

The Army had a tougher time finding an APS that would work on Stryker combat vehicles or Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles. Artis, a Virginia-based company, developed Iron Curtain, which was the first system considered a candidate for the Stryker. But the Army decided in 2018 it would take too much time and money to mature it.

Artis came out earlier this year with a new APS called Sentinel that the firm said is able to defeat top-attack threats, a growing challenge as forces face skies saturated with loitering munitions and other armed drones.

After Israeli firm Elbit Systems redesigned Iron Fist APS into a version called Iron Fist Light Decoupled, it is now on contract to be installed on the Bradley’s M2A4E1 configuration, Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems, said.

“All of the APS systems we have today are really point defense to a specific vehicle,” Dean said. The Army wants to figure out “how can that be expanded so that [it] can protect multiple vehicles with one system and might reside some place differently.”

For example, perhaps a robotic vehicle could help protect a group of platforms for a unit, meaning that not every vehicle would need a heavy countermeasures installation, Dean said.

The Army needs to figure out “which capabilities do I apportion to an individual platform, which ones do I apportion to the formation? That’s the hard conceptual work that Futures Command has to do,” Dean said.

Some solutions don’t necessarily have to be kinetic, he added. The 3rd Infantry Division, for example, recently used decoys to better hide command posts during a National Training Center rotation.

Masking capabilities is one area that the Army would like to investigate further, Bradley said. “We haven’t seen a whole lot of great solutions on the industry side. I’m really interested to see what, when they look at that problem set, what are some of those low-cost options that can be fielded largely to the force.”

One of the biggest concerns, he noted, is that current APS countermeasures are routinely more expensive than an incoming projectile. “I think there’s a lot of space there to really reduce the shot cost.”

Several vendors at the AUSA exposition unveiled new technologies showing how the protection market is changing.

Leonardo DRS is featuring a kit designed to augment force protection from top attack and loitering munitions threats. The effort is based on data from the company’s own systems in Ukraine as well as the conflict in Gaza, according to company vice president Charlene Caputo.

The system is able to effectively discriminate between things like birds and drones, a challenge many companies are trying to tackle. The radar kit can sit on any vehicle, she noted.

General Dynamics Land Systems, as part of a “mission command on the move” concept, banks on reducing the electromagnetic signature of a hybrid-electric drive Stryker, pairing it with an APS suite. The company is also presenting a robotic vehicle with spoofing technology meant to confuse enemies over the actual whereabouts of a mobile command post.