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Army puts advanced battle gear to the test

The Army is nearing the end of a soldier evaluation that will decide the fate of several pieces of advanced battle gear from the service’s now terminated Future Combat Systems effort.

The 23-day Limited User Test is underway at Fort Bliss, Texas, with soldiers from the Army Evaluation Task Force. The test is designed to assess the maturity, readiness and functionality of a set of high-tech equipment the Army intends to field to infantry brigade combat teams beginning in 2011.

The equipment, formerly known as “spin-outs” under the FCS program, is now being developed under the new Brigade Combat Team Modernization effort.

Army senior leaders launched BCTM in April in response to a decision by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to kill the 27-ton Manned Ground Vehicles portion of the Army’s FCS program in the fiscal 2010 defense budget, criticizing the design as ill-suited to survive current battlefield threats.

But Gates spared the high-tech communications network and the spin-out technologies slated for fielding in 2011.

Part of the new modernization approach also involves a pending report from “Task Force 120,” a working group led by Training and Doctrine Command's Army Capabilities Integration Center, to create a new strategy for modernizing Army BCTs. The task force’s findings, which will include a blueprint for how BCTs will fight in the future, are slated to be presented to Gates sometime after Labor Day.

The former FCS spin-out systems in the user test at Bliss are now known as the first of several capabilities sets the Army intends to develop and field in the future.

This set includes sophisticated network gear, unattended ground sensors, a small unmanned ground vehicle, a hovering unmanned aerial vehicle and the Non Line Of Sight Launch System, also known as “rockets in a box.”

These advanced systems provide soldiers with capabilities they don’t have today, Army officials maintain.

The Class I UAV, or micro air vehicle, can be launched to inspect the other side of a ridgeline or large building, so soldiers don’t have to risk exposing themselves to enemy fire.

“It is vulnerable, but it’s better to have the UAV shot down than a Joe to be shot,” said Col. Lee Fetterman, deputy director for Future Force Integration Directorate.

The Tactical Unattended Ground Sensor can detect seismic activity, such as potential enemy vehicle movement.

“They will take a picture for you to alert you to seismic input,” Fetterman said, describing that the sensor’s job is to tell soldiers “we heard something. We know something is out here. We take a picture, and you guys can figure it out.”

The main difference between this user test and past tests the Army conducted under FCS is that Army Test and Evaluation Command is serving as an independent evaluator, Army officials said.

“We have no agenda, no pre-conceived notions; we are out here to set up a test to let senior leaders decide whether they want any of these systems, some of them or none of them,” Col. Steven Duke, director for Maneuver Test Directorate for Operational Test Command under ATEC.

“It’s not a package deal. … It is entirely possible that some of these will be selected and others may not,” he said.

These new capability packages may sound like FCS with a different wrapper, but the concept is much more fluid than the FCS program’s rigid approach to equipping just 15 brigades with more than a dozen hi-tech systems.

“Now the Army has taken a new approach, dedicated to modernizing all 73 combat brigades,” both active and National Guard, said Paul Mehney, spokesman for the BCTM effort. The ambitious effort “is going to take a while,” he added, pointing to a goal of 2025 to equip all 73 of them.

Initially, the plan is to equip seven IBCTs with the first capability set of this advanced gear between 2011 and 2014.

The gear will have to do well in this user test as well as other tests planned for 2010, Army officials said.

The test at Bliss, which began Aug. 25 and is set to end Sept. 16, involves battalion- and brigade-size training operations with hundreds of soldiers using the advanced equipment in offensive, defensive and stability operation scenarios.

The test includes about 260 officials from ATEC involved in running the exercise and gathering data that will be compiled into a milestone assessment report that’s scheduled to be completed by mid-November, Army officials said.

“They will come back with a report that says ‘this stuff is ready,’ ‘it’s not ready’ or ‘it’s almost ready but needs more development,’ ” Mehney said.

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