Next Generation Bradley demonstrator

[Jammersix]

An infantry squad in an Abrams!

[TheForwardObserver]

Here's another clip of AUSA including a segment about the Bradley tech demonstrator.  Haven't yet found a pic of the interior of the troop bay but @6:50 min mark the dude mentions some changes in passing.

 

[Jammersix]

An infantry squad in every Abrams that can be lifted by helicopter, dropped offshore over the horizon, and make 20 knots to the beach at night in any sea and weather!

[Michael Emrys]

5 hours ago, Jammersix said:

An infantry squad in every Abrams that can be lifted by helicopter, dropped offshore over the horizon, and make 20 knots to the beach at night in any sea and weather!

...And should be manufactured entirely of unobtainium.

Michael

Edited October 7, 2016 by Michael Emrys

[IICptMillerII]

11 hours ago, Jammersix said:

An infantry squad in every Abrams that can be lifted by helicopter, dropped offshore over the horizon, and make 20 knots to the beach at night in any sea and weather!

Sounds like a Merkava/DD tank crossover! No idea how you could airlift it though. You would need rocket decelerating brakes along with a ton of parachutes to keep it from Hulk smashing itself into the ground. Ah hell, just get Lockheed Martin on it!

More on topic, I've heard a lot about proposed upgrades to both the Bradley and the Stryker. Its starting to sound like they want to compromise the capabilities of both vehicles to make them more "well rounded." I'm all for producing new vehicle hulls and making small upgrades here and there to keep them ahead of the curve, but some of the more drastic changes (like the proposed Stryker 30mm firepower upgrade) seem to be moving the vehicles away from their intended purposes. 

Interested to follow the discussion and see where it leads!

[Jammersix]

That would change everything, if the 82nd could jump in strapped into Abrams tanks!

[cue Ride of the Valkyries]

Da-dah, da-da-da-DAH-dah!

Edited October 7, 2016 by Jammersix

[Sublime]

Vlad has a secret agent teachig him abt all the capitalist pleasures and dirty thoughts and expressions anyways lol

 

Men in abrams? I believe the israelis call that a merkava

Edited October 8, 2016 by Sublime

[Sublime]

Jammer im just saddened that your digital fellating of the Bradley has been superseded by the digital equivalent of falling in love with the stripper - now youve dumped M2 and went to m1. Upgrade or downgrade.. you decide..

 

 

Edited October 8, 2016 by Sublime

[Jammersix]

Tipping the same stripper on three consecutive nights does not constitute a relationship.

Edited October 8, 2016 by Jammersix

[Kinophile]

Tell that to my mom.

Edited October 8, 2016 by kinophile

[John Kettler]

On 10/4/2016 at 9:16 AM, akd said:

Also at the same show, GD showed off a tech demonstrator for the Army's tentative Mobile Protected Firepower program, basically a light tank for Infantry / Airborne BCTs.  It combines an Abrams turret in a lightweight aluminum shell (turret is identical internally), the XM360 120mm cannon, and the hull from the UK's Ajax scout vehicle.

 

akd,

That thing look like something from the Metagaming Concepts board game Ogre. Always hated the turn sequence on that one. "Ogre moves. Ogre fires. Defender moves. Defender fires." Did figure out how to beat the Ogre consistently, only to be undone when the publisher imposed a GEV (hovercraft) force size limit. "Holy artificial constraint, Batman!"Now that I've been doing WeGo for nearly 17 years (how tempus fugit!), that sort of thing is, well, unnatural. Would say Hammer's Slammers, but am pretty sure all they had there were grav tanks. In any event, it looks like something which ought to be in a SF movie.

The Hummer with the 105 mm soft recoil howitzer (really, gun howitzer) is sort of like Rat Patrol on LSD mixed with Molly. Had to go back and look at the picture twice so I understood the impossible thing I thought I saw was in fact what I did see.

The Bradley Upgrade is moving toward inthe same category as the difference between the Regulus I and Regulus II cruise missiles. Congress was made to believe the second one was simply an improvement over the first, when the truth was they were two radically different missiles, as detailed here. While it certainly looks like a Bradley, the changes in it are so extreme it is de facto practically a new AFV. Certainly my now retired brother George, who served for quite some time on Bradley CFVs, would be blown away by the radical changes.

I like the look of the Stryker Ugrade turret, but I hope they reinforce the suspension and increase HP to offset all that additional weight. There's also the issue of top heaviness.

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited October 9, 2016 by John Kettler

[akd]

More detail:

Rebuilding The M2 Bradley: Same A4 Turret But Most Is New

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

on October 07, 2016 at 2:43 PM


BAE Next Generation Bradley demonstrator at AUSA

WASHINGTON: More horsepower. Higher suspension. A blast-resistant underbody. Safer fuel tanks. A*larger hull.*Take it all together and this may not just be another upgrade but more like a complete rebuild. The goal is allow the 1980s-vintage M2 Bradley to survive on the battlefields of the 2030s, contractor BAE Systems said. Since there is*no money in the budget for an all-new vehicle, the Army is listening.

“I’d love to have replacement programs today for Abrams and Bradley,” said Brig. Gen. David Bassett, the Army’s head of heavy vehicle modernization. “It doesn’t fit in this portfolio and this budget.”

So, just one floor up from the room where Bassett briefed reporters at the annual Association of the US Army conference, BAE showcased its Next-Generation Bradley. The concept vehicle certainly looks like the current Bradley to the untrained eye. The one obvious difference is the armored triangles jutting from the back, which hold the fuel tanks — relocated from inside the hull so a fuel explosion blasts outward, away from the crew. But there are so many other changes that, listening to BAE, I recalled the old parable of Lincoln’s axe. If you replace the handle and replace the blade, what’s left of what you started with?


The back of the Next Generation Bradley, showing the triangular reconfigured fuel tanks.

Plenty, said Deepak Bazaz, BAE’s director of Bradley programs. Most notably, he said, “we didn’t touch the turret.” The Next-Gen Bradley uses the latest-model A4 Bradley turret, complete with its expensive electronics, 25 mm cannon, and TOW anti-tank missiles. (That said, most currently Bradleys aren’t fully upgraded to the A4 standard). Other, less visible components carry over as well. Overall, rebuilding a current Bradley into a Next-Gen one should cost significantly less than buying an entirely new vehicle.

But how can it be the same vehicle when it has an all-new hull? I asked incredulously. Hulls aren’t actually a huge component of vehicle cost, Bazaz replied. They cost about the same as the transmission, and we don’t say we’re getting a new vehicle when we just get the transmission rebuilt.

The new hull is one piece of a ground-up redesign for survivability. The Bradley’s already being upgraded with a higher suspension, which both improves off-road mobility and gives more distance from a mine or roadside bomb. On top of this, the Next-Gen hull is thicker on the bottom and adds seven inches more headroom at the top: Headroom matters not just for comfort but because underbody blasts tend to slam soldiers’ skulls into the ceiling.

Inside the vehicle, the torsion-bar suspension has been redesigned so the bars don’t come loose in an explosion and rip upward through the floor of the troop compartment like oversized shrapnel. That troop-compartment floor is attached only at the sides instead of resting on the hull below it, so the bone-shattering shockwave travels up the walls instead of through the floor and into soldiers’ legs.

The redesign also relocates the fuel tanks — into those projecting triangles I mentioned above — and the spare TOW missiles, so a hit on either won’t cause an explosion in the crew compartment. Overall, BAE claims the upgraded protection against mines and roadside bombs is better than an MRAP, the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles built for Afghanistan and Iraq.

These upgrades do add weight. A typical modern Bradley — itself considerably uparmored over the 1981 original — weighs about 40 tons, Bazzaz said. A Next-Gen Bradley weighs 45 tons, a 20 percent increase. But whereas the current Bradleys have no automotive or electrical power to spare, limiting future upgrades, the Next-Gen has a superior engine, transmission, and generator, Bazzaz says, allowing it to grow to 50 tons with no loss in performance.

The extra electrical power is particularly important. Modern sensors, targeting systems and communications take a lot of power. Radio jammers to prevent roadside bombs from detonating take even more. Bradleys in Iraq sometimes experienced brown-outs, forcing them to shut off one system to free up power for another.

Then there’s the next wave in survivability, so-called Active Protection Systems (APS), which use radars to detect incoming rounds and mini-rockets to shoot them down. APS adds a lot of protection, but it draws a lot of power — which the current Bradley doesn’t have to spare. The Army is testing off-the-shelf APS in 2017 and 2018, said Col. Glenn Dean, but it’ll test it on Bradley last because of the vehicle’s limits on available size, weight, and power.


Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle at AUSA. AMPV pioneered the hull and many other components used for the Next-Generation Bradley.

The Army does have a program to upgrade the Bradley’s electrical power, suspension, engine, and turret, but its current plans don’t include any overhaul as radical as the Next-Gen Bradley. “What BAE has down there right now is basically an example of what you could do if you wanted to do an incremental improvement to the Bradley and incorporate some greater force protection,” said Col. Mike Milner, who manages the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle program.

AMPV is essentially an upgraded turretless Bradley — to be used as an armored transport, ambulance, and command post — and it pioneered many of the improvements used on Next-Gen Bradley. “The demonstrator they have down there is pretty much the AMPV hull with the Bradley turret on it, with the new drive train (and) a new transmission on the inside that offers a little better efficiency,” Milner told me.

So could you rebuild existing Bradleys as Next-Gen? “it’s something that could be done,” Milner said. As we go forward and look at the Bradley and where does the Army want to go in terms of its next generation fighting vehicle — does it want to do a clean-sheet design or does it want to do a major modification to the Bradley? — BAE has proposed one solution down there.”

Practically speaking, though, an all-new vehicle — that “clean-sheet design” — is something the Army can’t afford. Having canceled two previous attempts to replace the Bradley, the Future Combat Systems and the Ground Combat Vehicle, the Pentagon has pushed what’s now called the Future Fighting Vehicle out past 2030. Even if FFV materializes on time — and an Army-commissioned RAND study said there wasn’t enough money for it — it won’t be fielded fast enough to replace all the Bradleys until well into the 2040s.

“The way we’re affording all the things we’re affording is by producing things at really low rates,” said Brig. Gen. Bassett. It’s economically inefficient but at least gives the Army the option to ramp up if a crisis strikes and money starts to flow.


Brig. Gen. David Bassett

The Army is buying some new tracked vehicles, albeit ones built with largely off-the-shelf technology. It’s replacing its Vietnam-era M113 utility vehicles with those Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles (AMPVs), and it’s buying light-tank-like Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) vehicles to reinforce light infantry. But it’s buying AMPV and MPF at low rates, Bassett emphasized. Likewise, the Bradley, M1 Abrams tank, M109 Paladin howitzer, and 8×8 Stryker are getting upgrades, , but at a rate of “certainly less than a brigade a year,” Bassett told reporters AUSA. Stryker upgrades “could be as little as one every three years.”

Today is “the only time since World War II when the Army hasn’t had a combat vehicle under development, a new combat vehicle,” said Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, the Army’s top futurist, during a press call before AUSA. “You can only hang so much stuff on our existing tanks and Bradleys,” he warned. “If we don’t do something soon… the vehicles we have are going to be overmatched.”

[TheForwardObserver]

They've added 7 inches of head-room, but say nothing about butt-room.  That's a good metaphor for how the Army operates.  Reminds me of the time we asked for a new deadlier rifle to replace the M-16A2 and the Army was all like "did somebody ask for shrunken M-16s?"

[cool breeze]

lololololol Thanks for that

[akd]

more on MPF:

Quote

Army Light Tank Requirements Still Up in the Air

By Jon Harper



The Army is still mulling the final requirements for its "mobile protected firepower" vehicle as it examines what industry has to offer, service officials said Oct. 4.

The platform would be a light tank, intended for infantry brigade combat teams. In August, the Army held an industry day at Fort Benning, Georgia, to discuss the project.

“We wanted to make sure we left our requirements at this stage broad enough so that we understood the full breadth of what might be possible,” said Maj. Gen. David Bassett, program executive officer for ground combat systems, at the Association of the United States Army annual convention in Washington, D.C.

“We’re trying to be open-minded about … [requirements for] a certain amount of effects, a certain amount of protection and a certain amount of mobility,” he added.

The service only discussed “high level requirements” at the industry day, said Col. James Schirmer, program manager for armored fighting vehicles.

Those include a 32-ton maximum weight, at least a 50 millimeter cannon and “certain levels” of protection, Bassett said. If the vehicle weighs close to 32 tons it would not be air-droppable, he noted.

The Army is divided about which capabilities are the most important for MPF, said Michael Peck, director of enterprise business development at General Dynamics Land Systems.

“The Army has different needs and each camp in the Army sees things a little bit differently,” he told National Defense at the exposition.

“You’ve got a camp that says, ‘I really want to drop it out of an airplane.’ You’ve got a camp that said, ‘That’s not as important to me as protection of the troops,’” he added. “So there’s … a lot of discussions still going on.”

The vehicle needs to be light enough so that it can operate in environments with poor roads and bridges or in cities with narrow streets, which means it needs to be lighter than an Abrams tank, Schirmer noted. It also needs to be tracked so that it can climb over rubble or drive over cars in urban environments.

“We very much want … to get the Army to speak definitively on requirements,” Bassett said.

Once those decisions are made, industry needs to be ready for a “fairly rapid production program,” he said.

“We’re not willing to wait for you to go through a lengthy bottom-up design process,” he said. “What we are going to do is to give you some time on your own to get a design ready to compete, and then we’ll evaluate that and do a fairly rapid engineering, manufacturing and development phase.”

The Army is looking to the Marine Corps’ amphibious combat vehicle 1.1 program as a guide, he said.

“They didn’t pay industry to design very much,” Bassett said. “They asked them to deliver it within a fairly short period of time. We’re trying to model that same kind of strategy.”

The Army’s joint light tactical vehicle program could also serve as a template for the source selection process, he noted.

Ideally the Army would like to have multiple competitors, he said. “Although we’re still in the early stages of laying out the total resources that will be necessary to do this, I think we can learn a lot from JLTV where we benefited greatly from competition and having more than one vendor.”

Officials anticipate a milestone B decision in fiscal year 2019, with the goal of starting to equip infantry units in 2023.

“What that means is that industry has a couple years to get ready for that competition,” Bassett said. “We’re asking them to make that investment [in vehicle designs] and in exchange for that we have to be very confident about what our requirements are.”

At the AUSA exhibition, General Dynamics showed off its Griffin technology demonstrator, which looks like a light tank.

“We’ve been listening to the Army for three years on mobile protected firepower, and we got to the point where we thought we kind of understood what their needs were,” Peck said. “We decided it wasn’t valuable for us to talk about concepts. It was more valuable for us to show a concept.”

To construct the Griffin, the company combined a British Ajax armored fighting vehicle chassis, an aluminum version of an Abrams turret, and a lightweight cannon that was developed for the Future Combat Systems program.

“You’ve got mature technology in a tech demonstrator where all of the repair parts are already in peoples’ inventories. We’ve got ammo that’s already … in the inventory. You’ve got training on an Abrams turret that you’ve already done, so your crews are going to be very familiar with it. And you’ve leveraged all that investment in modernization” that has already been made, Peck said.

Using existing technologies in such a way would significantly lower the development risk for the MPF program, he said.

“Most of this stuff has already been tested by somebody at some point in time,” he said. “You’re putting some new things together [so] they’ll still have to do some tests. But the length of tests and the volume of tests will be greatly reduced. … There’s huge savings just because it’s something that’s already in their inventory.”

Army officials visited the General Dynamics booth where the demonstrator was on display and they provided feedback, Peck said.

“What they really liked was that it was familiar. It looks like an Abrams,” he said.

Officials were concerned about weight, he noted. But they also desire other capabilities that could necessitate tradeoffs.

“We told them you have some options and you need to make those decisions,” Peck said.

Bassett said he is "encouraged that General Dynamics would take the time and the money to kind of show their version of sort of the art of the possible by taking some of these existing vehicles and bringing them together in a way that helps us understand that requirement better."

“They started with the presumption that there’s an opportunity to leverage all the Army’s investment in Abrams,” he said, calling it “a pretty smart way” of offering a concept that service officials might not have thought of.

Bassett insisted that he is not giving any preference to one vendor’s solution over another.

Using existing technologies and having a competitive source selection process is key to controlling costs, he said.

“In a portfolio like this with the budget we have, we cannot afford to point a money gun at this problem,” he said. “We have got to be smart about how we buy.”

Photo: General Dynamics' Griffin technology demonstrator (Jon Harper)
 

Edited October 10, 2016 by akd

[Kinophile]

Man I just cant take that "MPF" seriously.

 

It looks exactly like something Hamas would throw together from cardboard and chicken wire. 

Or we'd build in a day on set because the Director just had a brain flatulence and now, somehow, he NEEDS MOAR TANQS!!

I know its essentially a model/display piece/visual placeholder...but still....

 

It has very similar proportions to a dashboard Bobblehead...

Edited October 11, 2016 by kinophile

[Sublime]

Yeah. Agreed. It also just seems too eerily similar in mission statement to the stryker mgs..

Edited October 11, 2016 by Sublime

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

30 minutes ago, Sublime said:

Yeah. Agreed. It also just seems too eerily similar in mission statement to the stryker mgs..

It's still a valid mission statement, we're just struggling to find an answer to it.

I've always really liked the XM8 myself.  Seemed like a reasonable solution, and I'm not really buying the "WE RECREATED AN ABRAMS TURRET!" argument.  Like having similar gunner's controls/commonality in interface would be good, but it only took us a little while to make former MGS tankers get back to standard tanks.

As far as the XM8, the modular armor seemed like a great idea (especially in regards to keeping it air drop capable), the 105 MM is a very solid gun outside of fighting literal top of the line modern MBTs, and it had less of a weirdo profile.  Think with an updated autoloader it'd be pretty well on part for what we're looking for (although something might be said for using a 120 MM breachloader mortar instead of a 105 MM gun).

[Kinophile]

6 minutes ago, panzersaurkrautwerfer said:

It's still a valid mission statement, we're just struggling to find an answer to it.

I've always really liked the XM8 myself.  Seemed like a reasonable solution, and I'm not really buying the "WE RECREATED AN ABRAMS TURRET!" argument.  Like having similar gunner's controls/commonality in interface would be good, but it only took us a little while to make former MGS tankers get back to standard tanks.

As far as the XM8, the modular armor seemed like a great idea (especially in regards to keeping it air drop capable), the 105 MM is a very solid gun outside of fighting literal top of the line modern MBTs, and it had less of a weirdo profile.  Think with an updated autoloader it'd be pretty well on part for what we're looking for (although something might be said for using a 120 MM breachloader mortar instead of a 105 MM gun).

To clarify, I assume you mean the M8 tank..not the XM8 rifle

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

3 minutes ago, kinophile said:

To clarify, I assume you mean the M8 tank..not the XM8 rifle

Yep.  I never saw it was type classified our whatever, most of the documentation I have still calls it the XM8.

When I was an absolutely brand new LT I got my hands on one of the tank platoon field manuals that had been published when the M8 seemed like a sure thing.  I was briefly excited because I hadn't heard anything about it in years (keep in mind, I was in college when wikipedia was just starting, search engines still took a lot of finesse to find what you were looking for) and I thought it'd be cool to be a light tank PL.  Then I found out it was pretty much ultra dead.

[Michael Emrys]

1 hour ago, kinophile said:

Man I just cant take that "MPF" seriously.

It looks exactly like something Hamas would throw together from cardboard and chicken wire. 

Or this?

Michael

[Michael Emrys]

9 minutes ago, kinophile said:

To clarify, I assume you mean the M8 tank...

Jeez, I hadn't thought about that tank in maybe decades. Seemed like a plausible idea at the time. Probably fell victim of the Peace Dividend.

Michael

[panzersaurkrautwerfer]

Hah.  Tangentially:

When I was in college, I had a National Defense Policy class, and the final exam was as a group, you and some of your friends had to construct a defense policy to meet a new president's needs and desires.  You would be graded by the professor plus the new "president" that you had to present to (who were all other professors, ranging from an actually internationally well known writer on political psychology, one of our engineering profs who'd been an A-10 pilot and full bird Colonel in the USAF, and another who'd been a USN Commander and UN observer*).  For my group, I took on basically restructuring the force for the various land components of the US military.

I scrapped the Stryker, instead basically pushing for a LAV-25 based solution.  Then I pushed for light armor to replace the Abrams in the USMC, and in some US Army formations (mostly there would have just been LAV-Light tank formations instead of Strykers, plus light tanks in Airborne units).  I decided light tank was not a good phrase to use, and further more, I knew the military historically avoided it (see the Sheridan).  So I did the classic military thing and made an acronym:

High Mobility Protected Armored Support System.  I figured high mobility encompassed that it was tracked vs wheeled, protected made the difference that it was resistant vs immune to enemy fire, armored referred to Armor as a tank/branch concept, and support was that in the formations it was assigned to, it was not the primary arm like in an armor formation, but instead there to give tank support to infantry forces.  

Then I realized what HMPASS sounded like when you pronounced it out loud.

It when into the presentation as the High Mobility Direct Fire Weapons Platform instead. 


*I had that guy for a few classes.  And he was amazing, great teacher, challenged our brains regularly.  But he was:

1. A Naval Officer
2. First born in the US of Sicilian immigrants
3. From Manhattan

So take all of the New Yorker accents, weird Navyisms (never close the door, always secure the hatch), and then random godfather interludes and it made for an interesting experience.  

The epic part though, was the group that presented to him advocated:

1. Largely cutting the USN as "no longer relevant"
2. Cutting ties with Israel and immediately recognizing Palestine as a legitimate state.

Needless to say they endured a few terrible minutes before he fired them all, and they left with the grades to show it.  

[akd]

BAE brought their resurrected M8 to the same show (right side showing up armor package):

 

[c3k]

I'm a huge proponent of the 120mm breechloading mortar in a turret on a wheeled chassis. Commonality with the 120mm mortar, very light recoil, and brings the "boom" to the party. The 105mm would be introducing a whole new weapon/ammo. (C'mon, what is left in the inventory that uses it?) Sure, it's a good weapon for non-MBT, but the Javelin is better. Anything carrying a 105 would be shredded by the same stuff which would shred a 120mm breechloader.

https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=120mm+breech+loading+mortar&view=detailv2&&id=FF0B5861B0F6D53E8517229100F5F01110A70825&selectedIndex=0&ccid=pQsR8gVi&simid=608000789998864297&thid=OIP.Ma50b11f205625944827b099ec3934fbeo0&ajaxhist=0

 

Toss some vehicle-launched Javelins, and you've got your platoon of fire support vehicles. Put 3 or so in each light company. Direct fire HE, Indirect fire on-call, Javelin for MBTs.

Commonality helps. A lot. Logistics and all that.