BAE Beats Upstart SAIC To Build Marine Amphibious Combat Vehicle



The initial contract announced today was just $198 million for the first 30 vehicles, to be delivered by next fall, but Marines want to replace approximately 870 existing AAVs with better-protected, more mobile ACVs "as rapidly as we can," which will take into "the mid to late '20s."

The Marine Corps has chosen long-time tank-maker BAE over upstart SAIC to build its new Amphibious Combat Vehicle. A wheeled troop carrier capable of swimming from Navy ships to shore and then driving deep inland, the ACV will replace the aging, ungainly, and under-armored AAV as the spearhead of amphibious assaults. The ability to conduct such landings is the modern Marine Corps’ raison d’être — but it’s come into question, even by the Senate, in this era of long-range missiles.

The initial contract announced today was just $198 million for the first 30 vehicles, to be delivered by next fall. 30 more will come the next year, with Initial Operational Testing & Evaluation (IOT&E) and a decision to go to Full Rate Production expected in 2020. Overall, Marine officials told reporters they want to replace approximately 870 existing AAVs with ACVs “as rapidly as we can,” which will take into “the mid to late ’20s.” The current budget plan values the first 204 vehicles at an $1.12 billion.

Winner BAE Systems is an international giant, the eighth largest defense contractor the US and third largest in the world. Among many other things, it builds and upgrades the M2 Bradley troop carrier and M109 Paladin howitzer, both heavy tracked vehicles, at its York, Pennsylvania factory. BAE or its predecessor companies have built every Marine amphibious armored vehicle since the amtracs of World War II.



SAIC, by contrast, started out as a consulting and services company, noted for its engineering expertise. It branched out during the Iraq War to work on MRAPS, essentially uparmored trucks. Its Charleston, SC facility installs high-grade military gear like electronics on other companies’ vehicles and upgrades the Marines’ existing AAVs. So the wheeled ACV was SAIC’s first foray into both full-size armored fighting vehicles and into manufacturing, making it the riskier option for the Marine Corps. SAIC, in a statement, said while it was “disappointed…we are committed to growing this line of business” — but failure here is a bad sign for SAIC’s other armored vehicle bid, to build the US Army’s tracked Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) light tank.

Despite their differences, both companies offered basically similar 8×8 vehicles. Both started with foreign designs, since the US is a world leader in tracked armored vehicles but not in wheeled ones. BAE collaborated with Italy’s IVECO (subsidiary of world-famous Fiat) to offer a variant of the SuperAV/Freccia/Centauro family in Italian service since 1991. SAIC partnered with Singapore’s ST Kinetics to offer an upgrade of the Singaporean army’s Terrex. (For comparison, the main 8×8 armored fighting vehicles already in US service, neither of them amphibious, are the Marine LAV and Army Stryker, both descendants of the Swiss MOWAG Piranha).



The most obvious difference: The BAE vehicle can carry two more infantrymen. While both vehicles had a crew of three up front — driver, gunner, and commander — BAE could carry 13 fully equipped foot soldiers in the back, while SAIC could only carry 11. Since the current Marine rifle squad is 13 men, and the future squad will shrink to 12 (including a drone operator), that may have been a crippling disadvantage for SAIC.

Is ACV Irrelevant?

Even as the Marines award the contract for what they’re calling ACV 1.1, the Senate Armed Services Committee wants to freeze spending on the next phase of the Amphibious Combat Vehicle program, ACV 1.2. The program may only proceed once the Pentagon reports to Congress on the viability of amphibious landing in future warfare. Or, to quote the Senate draft: “whether amphibious forced entry operations against advanced peer competitors should remain an enduring mission for the joint force considering the stressing operational nature and significant resource requirements of such mission.”

That’s a long way of stating the big question the Marine Corps must confront: whether the amphibious assaults which the ACV is built for, and which have been central to the Marines’ identity since World War II, have become suicidal with the spread of long-range precision missiles. Land-based anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCMs) can sink Navy ships hundreds of miles offshore, anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) can kill armored vehicles as they swim in, and RPGs and landmines can hit anyone who makes it to the beach.

Of course, that’s all assuming the enemy is ready for you. The first principle of tactics is “hit ’em where they ain’t.” Modern Marine Corps doctrine emphasizes intelligence and maneuver to put small, fast moving forces ashore at multiple undefended or poorly defended points, instead of a single set-piece assault like Tarawa or Normandy. (Of course, Normandy was selected in large part because it was one of the less likely of the Northern European landing sites. And much effort was put into deceiving the Germans as to where the Allies really would land. Read up on Operation Bodyguard!)

“Yes, modern ATGM and ASCM threats are serious,” said Dakota Wood, a retired Marine now at the Heritage Foundation. “(But landings would) avoid enemy concentrations where possible….Not every contested environment will be so heavily defended as to make it impregnable or impervious to assault.”

“If the US is to have options to pose dilemmas to an enemy, to seize terrain, to project power in ways that don’t require an airport, seizure of a port, or long overland movements, it will need some type of amphibious assault capability,” Wood told me in an email. “This is what the Corps is working to figure out.”

In this operational context, the ACV’s cross-country mobility is at least as important as its ability to swim, since you’d likely land at an undefended beach some distance from the (presumably well-defended) objective. That’s why the ACV program went for much smaller vehicles than the current AAV, whose bulky, boat-like hull can carry 28 Marines efficiently from ship to shore but then lumbers once on land. For all its size, the AAV is fairly poorly protected, especially against roadside bombs and other improvised mines. The new ACV, by contrast, is optimized to move and survive on land.

The Marines had tried for decades to get better performance on the water. They spent $3 billion on the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), which could skim across the surface of the water like a speedboat at 20 to 25 knots, compared to the AAV’s 6 to 8 knots. But the cost and complexity of the “high water speed” vehicle, and its poor performance on land, caused the Marines to cancel it in 2011.



Instead, after intense debates and dramatic reversals, the Marines settled on the current Amphibious Combat Vehicle, which will have the same water speed as the old AAV. Originally, the program proposed a minimally amphibious ACV 1.1 and a more capable ACV 1.2, but both contractors met the ACV 1.2 specs with their 1.1 entries. The ACV 1.2 will still include stronger weapons and other upgrades, the Marine officials said. (Despite persistent rumors, however, ACV 1.2 will be wheeled like the 1.1, not tracked).

Even the upgraded ACV 1.2 will still leave one problem unsolved: how to get from ship to shore at high speed, allowing the Navy to stand off out of range of most, if not all, land-based missiles. “The ACV 1.1 seems more about motorization than amphibiosity,” said a skeptical Jim Hasik, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. “The program really won’t provide the Navy and the Corps with the standoff capability they need for a landing on a coastline protected by mobile anti-ship missiles”

The Marines still want a high-water-speed option eventually, tentatively called the ACV 2.0, but it may not be a high-speed armored amphibious vehicle, officials said. How to go faster — new landing craft, robotic “sleds” to carry land vehicles, hovercraft — is an open question

The Marine Corps has lost its first F-35





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Prabowo accuses Jokowi govt of weakening TNI





Gerindra Party chairman Prabowo has accused the government of trying to weaken the Indonesian Military (TNI) and putting the country at political risk.

The retired military general made the remarks on Tuesday in a 40-minute live streaming video that addressed Gerindra cadres on his official Facebook fan page.

“The TNI is weak, our Navy and Air Force are weak, our resources have been seized. As a result, our economic condition grows worse and burdens the people,” Prabowo said in the video.



Gerindra deputy chairman Ferry Juliantono said that Prabowo meant to criticize the government for favoring the National Police instead of the TNI. For example, he added, the government did not give the TNI a greater counterterrorism role in the new terrorism law,.

He also pointed to the recent inauguration of Comr. Gen. Iriawan, a high-ranking officer in the National Police, as acting West Java governor.



“The government seems to treat the police as its ‘golden boy’,” Ferry said on Wednesday.

In his video, Prabowo also said that these days, money could buy power, and pointed to massive corruption in the current administration.

“There is a power that sees itself controlling and determining who can be regents, mayors, governors – even the next president,” said Prabowo.

“Our [state] institutions are weak. As a result, our political power is at stake,” he added.

Prabowo also satirized President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo for frequently distributing aid packages of staple foods to the people to increase his popularity. “But that does nothing to improve our economic sovereignty,” he said.

The ruling Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle (PDI-P) criticized Prabowo’s remarks, saying that he had no solid data behind his arguments.



“Prabowo’s opinions about the TNI and our economic condition are inaccurate. He did not refer to any data or analysis. [It is] more a subjective judgement,” said Andreas Pareira of the PDI-P central executive board.

Andreas, who is also a member of House of Representatives Commission I overseeing defense, also rebutted Prabowo's criticism, pointing to the professionalism of the modern-day TNI.

“The military is now more professional than during Prabowo's era. It is now more focused on the defense sector. We provide them with the best facilities and best weaponry,” he said. (evi)

On Friday 15 June, at the French army firing range of Suippes, CMI Defence gave a dynamic exhibition of its range of turrets. Thierry Renaudin, president of CMI Defence, gave an overview of what was to be demonstrated. Preliminary remark: CMI Defence introduces itself as a "turret integrator", which means that the chassis on which the turrets were demonstrated on 15 June are only examples and in no way specifically selected for these turrets. Any other chassis could be taken into consideration.

For its turrets, CMI Defence has long been focusing on how to combine firepower on the one hand, and lightweight on the other hand, providing great efficiency at the target as well as high mobility. The manufacturer wanted to demonstrate the real capabilities of its entire range of systems. This exceptional demonstration never happened in the history of CMI. The demonstrations involved no less than six Cockerill weapon systems: first, its protected and remotely operated turret of medium caliber: the CPWS 25; second, the unmanned and medium caliber variant of the Cockerill 3000 Series, the Cockerill 3030 APC; third, the manned and medium-caliber variant of the Cockerill 3000 Series, the Cockerill 3030 FSV; fourth, the manned and large-caliber variant of Cockerill 3000 Series, the Cockerill 3105 AG, featuring a 105mm Cockerill gun; fifth, the Cockerill turret with medium pressure 90mm gun and automatic loading system, called the Cockerill LCTS 90MP; sixth, the Cockerill turret with a low pressure 90mm gun, called the Cockerill CSE 90LP. The firing sequence included Galix shots, proposed by CMI’s partner Lacroix.

With the exception of the CPWS, all these turrets are currently covered by a supply, support, training or maintenance contract. Indeed, CMI Defence is currently assembling Cockerill 3000 Series turrets in its Belgian facilities at a pace of above twenty turrets per month and has already delivered no less than 130 of them to its customers. Beyond its turrets, the large caliber Cockerill guns that equip some of them are also designed and manufactured by CMI Defence. CMI Defence is thus the only Western company currently in production for 105mm guns. This production takes place in Distroff, CMI Defence’s subsidiary located in the East of France.



CMI Defence’s ambition is to accompany its customers throughout the life of its systems, for their maintenance in operational conditions, but also to optimize their use by the users. To this end, the manufacturer has developed a training program, which allows crews to learn how to best use Cockerill weapon systems. These trainings are organized in classrooms, in workshops, on immersive virtual simulators, on embedded simulators and, of course, on real systems. In this context, CMI Defence has built a high-quality training center in Commercy, just one hour away from Suippes. It can accommodate up to 120. This training center, called Campus Cockerill, is now operational.

In 2015, CMI Defence signed a framework agreement with the French Ministry of Defence which gives it access to the Suippes firing range, where the company is authorized to conduct its live firing activities. With the Cockerill Campus and this infrastructure of Suippes, the trainees are placed in ideal conditions throughout their learning process.

After Thierry Renaudin’s explanations, Guillaume Beusen, a former officer in the Belgian army and now CMI Defence’s Training and Support Manager, explained in detail what the restricted audience would be given to witness. Like Thierry Renaudin, he expressed a great satisfaction about the partnership with Hanwha whose K21 chassis is used for the Cockerill 3105 AG turret, hence a convincing demonstration of the 105mm gun. The other chassis used for the various turret demonstations - Renault Sherpa, Commando, SIBMAS, Patria and LAV3 - are good examples of what can be found in the world.

got $$$?

1) we have much more urgent and necessary defence requirements such as improving the Navy's ability to fight Suluk infiltration

2) A light tank would be less useful for us than for our neighbours

2. how so?

Navy Pilot Dies in A-29 Crash at White Sands Missile Range





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Lynx

VS

hey anyone following how Saudi is doing in Yemen?

This post has been edited by KLboy92: Jun 24 2018, 07:25 PM

as shitty as ever... heard they hired foreigners to 'advise' their paki mercenaries

Baru2 ni, presiden Persatuan Patriot Kebangsaan Brig-Gen (B) Mohamed Arshad Raji, menggesa Menteri Pertahanan yang baru, Mohamad Sabu, untuk menghentikan amalan ahli politik, memakai pakaian seragam tentera.
Arshad berkata, menteri pertahanan sebelum Mat Sabu, telah salahguna pakaian seragam tentera, untuk membuat "pernyataan fesyen".

Saudi coalition progressing but getting mauled.

Coalition now pushing into Hodeidah province but facing fierce resistance as this is one of the port cities that Houthi relies on.

So far, Houthis do not have the initiative, mostly defending their Southern holdings.

In the north, they still make some raids into Jizan province, but these are just hit and run against Saudi border guards. It does not really affect the war in Yemen.

Indonesian Army Aviaton 11th Assault Squadron pilot & gunner in their AH-64E Apache Guardian attack helicopter. Credit to Indonesian Army Helicopter.



This post has been edited by azriel: Jun 25 2018, 03:45 PM

Ahli politik mau pakai uniform kena jadi macam ini orang..

is his BG rank honorary?

any info on the port attack, like Coalitions and Houthi strength, ships involved, how they progressed?

https://southfront.org/category/all-article...dle-east/yemen/