With the latest delays, it now seems likely the Joint Strike Fighter program will take 21 years from concept to combat-readiness. And that's all-too-typical for a major U.S. weapon program; the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft and the F-22 stealth jet took just as long. These decades-long developments aren't just a waste of time, effort, and cash. They can be self-defeating. "When systems finally reach the users, the world has changed around them," Bill Sweetman warns at Ares. If the military isn't careful, it could pour hundreds of billions of dollars into weapons that are obsolete the day they enter service.
It's for that reason that a small cadre of Air Force officers, including Lt. Col. Dan Ward, advocated a new, "fast, inexpensive, simple and tiny" approach to buying weapons, aiming to reduce 20-year development cycles to just three years by using mostly off-the-shelf components. The "FIST" concept saw its first big success with the MC-12W spy plane, which went from blueprint to combat in just 13 months.
Now the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency wants to do the same for Army ground vehicles. Darpa's Adaptive Vehicle Make initiative means to replace old-school, metal-bending prototyping with new, speedy computer modeling taking a fraction of the time. “We look forward to tackling some very challenging fundamental problems that, once solved, offer the potential to truly revolutionize the way we make products in the defense industry and beyond,” AVM manager Paul Eremenko said.
To jump-start the program, Darpa recently awarded contracts to 13 U.S. defense firms for developing "meta-language" and "model-based design flow." The result could be a sort of tank-manufacturing version of the *Sim *line of video games. Call it Sim Tank.
Computer modeling is nothing new for American arms-makers. But today's sims aren't accurate enough to translate directly into hardware. To speed up development, new models will need what the industry calls "correct-by-construction" levels of fidelity.
If it works, AVM could help the Army avoid yet another systemic failure in its vehicle design. In the late 1990s, the Army had a wide range of new, ultra-heavy vehicles in development, including the 40-ton Crusader howitzer and engineer vehicles based on the 60-ton M-1 tank. The Army canceled nearly all of the new vehicles in the early 2000s when it decided light, smart tanks were the way of the future. Ten years later, the resulting Future Combat Systems of smart vehicles, pictured, suffered a similar fate. The Army canceled them, too, after deciding heavier is better after all.
Two generations of vehicle design have come and gone without fielding new equipment, leaving 1960s- and '80s-vintage tanks and artillery soldiering on indefinitely. If Darpa's high-tech modeling works and development gets faster, the Army might actually produce new vehicles some day.
Photo: Army
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