The US Army is betting on digital engineering to save time and money as it develops its new infantry combat vehicle.<\/p>\n
\u201cXM-30 is being built through a modular open standard that allows us, in theory, to more rapidly replace components, which allows us to modernize more quickly,\u201d Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the program executive officer for ground combat systems, told Defense One during an interview.<\/p>\n
The Army has traditionally deployed an updated combat vehicle \u201cabout every 10 years,\u201d Dean said. \u201cSome of that’s driven by the industrial timelines of what it takes to stand up the supply chain in the factory and building the vehicle, but some of that’s because the way we have architected software in the past is not as flexible.\u201d<\/p>\n
By leaning on digital engineering\u2014a practice the Army has been embracing more broadly\u2014the Army can spot deficiencies in vehicle designs sooner. The XM-30 is the service\u2019s latest effort to replace the M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. The US Army in 2023 selected two contractors, Rheinmetall Vehicles and General Dynamics Land Systems, to produce prototypes for the XM-30. The contracts are worth about $1.6 billion.<\/p>\n
The XM-30 program, formerly called the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, is the Army\u2019s first\u00a0 ground combat vehicle designed completely digitally, Dean said. And by using modular open system architecture, different systems from different vendors can be put together\u2014and work seamlessly\u2014on the same platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are actually building the stand-in capability. So it’s not the final XM-30, but it’s a surrogate for it that will allow us to test that,\u201d Dean said.<\/p>\n
That demonstrator platform will allow each contractor to install and change out their systems to see how quickly it can be done.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd that’s tied to our digital acquisition, digital engineering effort, which XM-30 is a born-digital program. All of its design work is essentially being done in the cloud, tied to model-based assessment,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have unprecedented insight into [the] level of design, level of detail, level of interaction between the components and the design, all the way from preliminary design through how we validate and test whether all the performance parameters we specify we are actually going to achieve.\u201d<\/p>\n
But before contractors can build physical XM-30 prototypes to test, the Army needs to finalize the vehicle\u2019s design through a critical design review in fiscal year 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the first time we’ve taken a complete system through that level of design in a purely digital space,\u201d he said. \u201cWe’ve learned quite a bit based on the amount of insight we’re getting through that digital process. A little bit frightening, because we learn we know a lot more than we ever did before. Before we do these design reviews, everybody would get in the room for a week, and we’d go through the 500-PowerPoint slide presentation about every system on the platform. And you thought you saw how everything interrelated. Now, we’re seeing we didn’t. There’s a lot of holes in our knowledge that we now actually can see live in real time. And so we believe we’re getting to the end product, a better end product sooner than we were before.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dean said there\u2019s still work to be done to realize digital engineering\u2019s benefits, but the goal is for the combat vehicle industrial base to \u201cmatch what we’ve seen in the commercial space.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWe’re building new tools. We’re building new relationships. XM-30 is kind of unique in that in some ways, it’s highly joint\u2014they are using Air Force software development tools in the Space Force cloud, using a bunch of best practices that we adopted from some Navy development programs. So we’ve really benefited from the total force modernization,\u201d Dean said. \u201cWe’re training, now, people to operate in a digital environment, and that, I think, is going to pay us forward for generations.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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