The Army picked its two traditional armored vehicle manufacturers, General Dynamics and BAE Systems, to build contending prototypes for its Mobile Protected Firepower light tank, the service announced today. Each company will get up to $376 million to build 12 prototypes, with delivery starting in 14 months and testing in 16. In 2022, the Army will pick a final winner to build a planned 504 vehicles.
Cut from the competition today was upstart SAIC and its Singaporean partner STK. It’s the second swing and a miss for SAIC, which lost the Marine Corps Amphibious Combat Vehicle to BAE earlier this year. SAIC has a strong record on roadside-bomb resistant trucks — the famous MRAPs — but its efforts to break into the market for full-scale armored fighting vehicles have been rebuffed so far.
Instead, the Army’s turned to its traditional vendors, with a $375.9 million award to BAE and $335 million to General Dynamics Land Systems. A Mobile Protected Firepower win would be particularly advantageous for General Dynamics, because GD is pushing a variant of its MPF offering, the Griffin, for a much larger Army competition: the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle (OMFV), meant to replace thousands of M2 Bradleys, the Army’s heavily armed and armored troop carrier. (Griffin III is the OMFV version, Griffin II the MPF). Buying variants of the same vehicle for both missions would simplify Army training and logistics.
BAE, which makes both the Bradley and its turretless support variant, the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle, is also positioning itself for the Bradley replacement, but BAE’s likely offering there is the European CV90, which isn’t related to its MPF contender, the Armored Gun System.
SAIC hasn’t publicly discussed an OMFV bid so far, and losing out on another Army competition is doubtlessly discouraging. UPDATE But company spokesperson Lauren Presti left all doors open in an email to me this evening. “Of course, we are disappointed that our Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle prototype was not selected,” she wrote. “As for the (Bradley replacement), we are anticipating the Army’s release of a draft RFP for OMFV with great interest. We will continue to work with our partners ST Engineering, CMI Defense, Plasan, and other technology providers to assess and evaluate the Army’s requirements.”
The Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle is essentially a 30-ton light tank to accompany airborne troops and other light infantry where the 70-ton M1 Abrams heavy tank can’t go. As such, MPF would fill a gap the Army’s had for 22 years, ever since it retired the easy-to-deploy but technically troubled M551 Sheridan in 1996. Ironically, BAE’s offering is an evolution of the M8 Buford Armored Gun System that the Army developed to replace the Sheridan and then cancelled at the last minute before buying it.
Now, MPF is not required to be droppable by parachute the way the Sheridan and the original Armored Gun System were, nor capable of fitting on an Air Force C-130 turboprop transport the way the cancelled Future Combat Systems vehicle was supposed to be. But it is small enough to fit two on a C-17 jet transport for landing on a dirt airstrip — or to drive over rickety bridges and down narrow streets where a M1 might not fit. Being lighter also reduces fuel consumption and thus strain on supply lines, a major problem with the turbine-driven M1.
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