FEATURE ARTICLE

November 2005

For Army’s Future Combat Vehicles, Flying by C-130 No Longer Required

By Sandra I. Erwin

The Army has given up on its ambitious goal of building a new combat vehicle that is as durable as the Abrams tank and only one-fourth of its weight.

When the Army first conceived the Future Combat Systems family of vehicles—slated to replace the Abrams and other weapons in the existing fleet in about two decades—one of the specifications was that the vehicles be transportable by C-130 cargo aircraft. That would limit each vehicle’s weight to about 18 tons.

Building an 18-ton vehicle that can survive the rigors of combat like an Abrams proved to be too hard and unrealistic from an engineering standpoint, officials said.

Earlier this year, both Army program officials and FCS prime contractors—the Boeing Company and Science Applications International Corporation—decided that the early FCS prototypes would weigh 24 tons, and would not fit in a C-130 airplane unless its tires were flattened and the vehicle was stripped of weapons, munitions, armor kits and high-tech sensors.

“There’s been an evolution in thinking in the Army on transportability,” said Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey. The shift started when the Army fielded the Stryker light armored personnel carrier in 2001, and realized how tough it was to fit the 20-ton vehicle into a C-130. “Making Stryker C-130 transportable turned out to be a very difficult challenge,” Harvey told reporters at a news conference in Aberdeen, Md.

The Army did away with the C-130 transportability requirement and, instead, stipulated that three FCS vehicles must fit in a C-17 heavy lift cargo aircraft. This would allow for a 24-ton FCS.

Paul Kern, retired Army general and former chief of the Army Materiel Command, said the service had struggled with the transportability of FCS for several years. “It’s been an engineering concern,” he told National Defense. “Keeping the weight down was a critical issue,” because, historically, most weapon systems tend to gain weight over time as new components and high-tech gadgets get added to them. Kern does not believe that the weight is nearly as significant a challenge as the integration of the FCS family of vehicles into a single command-and-control network.

“What we want to do in a future combat system is to take advantage of the network ability of a Stryker force and build a force that can go where the enemy is not, and go where the enemy doesn’t expect us,” said Lt. Gen. James Dubik, commander of Fort Lewis, Wash., which is home to three Stryker brigades.

One way to lower the weight of FCS, Dubik said, is to replace steel with composite alloys and ceramics, to move away from gunpowder technology and into electromagnetic or electric mechanics, and to stop using petroleum as propulsion and adopt hybrid technologies.

Army officials have downplayed the significance of the weight gain in FCS, insisting that the current design is light enough to meet Army combat needs. The C-130 weight threshold was not intended to be taken literally, but rather was meant to serve as a “design template” that would discipline engineers and force them to “think light,” Harvey said.

“At the onset, it was a technical challenge in the program,” he added. “We started out with the C-130 and evolved.”

Lessons from fighting in Iraq played into the revised thinking about C-130 transportability, Harvey noted. The Stryker brigades based in Mosul, Iraq, for example, often would be called on short notice to redeploy to Baghdad. It is so cumbersome to disassemble the Strykers so they can fit in a C-130 that it was faster for them to drive, he said.

The FCS, similarly, will be stripped down to an 18.5 ton “bare bones” configuration to fly aboard a C-130, said Dan Zanini, vice president of SAIC who oversees the FCS program.

Whether the 24-ton tank replacement will be as survivable in combat as the Abrams will not be determined for certain until 2008, Zanini said in an interview at Aberdeen. A newly developed 120 mm gun will be installed in an FCS vehicle during the next two years and undergo live-fire testing in 2008.

The FCS, however, will have several advantages when it comes to protection from mines and other explosives, Zanini said. Unlike the Abrams, which focuses on “frontal survivability,” the FCS will be equipped with all-around protection, including “active” defensive systems that shoot down incoming rocket-propelled grenades. Those technologies, however, have yet to be certified for combat.

The new 120 mm gun, called the XM360, currently is in development by General Dynamics Land Systems and Benet Laboratories. It will fire the same ammunition as the Abrams gun, in addition to a new round, called the “medium range munition,” which will have beyond-line-of-sight range, according to GDLS spokesman Karl Oskoian. The XM360 will weigh about 1,000 pounds less than the Abrams’ gun.

The lighter gun could be retrofit to the Abrams, but would require substantial reengineering, he said. Mounting such a large gun on a 24-ton FCS is no less a challenge. “The FCS has to accommodate the recoil force and impulse in a much lighter vehicle,” Oskoian said.

The Army had considered an FCS design with a 105 mm gun, but decided that was not lethal enough, Harvey said.

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