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29 Jun 16. US Army Testing Foreign Active Protection Systems For US Combat Vehicles. The US Army is turning to foreign systems for an interim solution for advanced protection for its combat vehicles against rocket-propelled grenades, anti-tank guided missiles and other threats.
The service’s effort to rapidly integrate already developed solutions is heating up this summer as the Army tests out what will likely be four different solutions on M1 Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Stryker combat vehicles.
Such threats like RPGs aren’t just resident in one theater, but are problems world-wide for armored combat vehicles and it’s only growing, particularly in the Central and European Command area of operations.
Partly spurring the effort is the possibility that Russia is ahead of the US Army when it comes to armor protection as evidenced by the reported survivability of its tanks when up against Ukrainian anti-tank and anti-armor weapons in the ongoing conflict along Ukraine’s border with Russia.
The Army’s laser focus on fighting wars in the Middle East over the last 15 years caused it to prioritize developing other capabilities needed for combat in the CENTCOM arena such as counter-improvised explosive device capabilities like Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected Vehicles.
Three out of four of the solutions the Army will rapidly put through the paces in demonstrations this summer come from foreign countries — with two from Israel — that have, out of necessity, already developed and fielded or are preparing to field active protection systems. The plan is to integrate these systems, following this year’s demonstrations, onto combat vehicles as an interim solution to first be sent to Europe.
While the Army has yet to make its fielding plans known, a widely held belief is that the service will field a brigade’s worth of each vehicle with APS, according to Daniel Goure, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, who is familiar with the program.
“We are always looking for ways to enhance the protection provided in our combat vehicles and recognize Active Protection Systems (APS) as one of our highest priorities towards this end,” according to the Army’s Combat Ground Systems program office spokeswoman Ashley Givens.
The Army is working with the science and technology community to develop the Modular Active Protection System (MAPS), the Army’s S&T cornerstone APS effort, Givens said.
But MAPS — the objective capability — is years away and in the interim the Army needs to address urgent operational needs.
Givens said the Army intends to install and characterize a range of matured and improved commercial APS solutions across the ground combat portfolio.
“By prototyping these integration activities cooperatively with Army S&T, potential APS vendors and our platform integrators, we will be able to posture the Army with solutions that can be more rapidly integrated and greatly reduce both acquisition and operational risk,” she said.
Katrina McFarland, the Army’s acquisition chief, told Defense News this month at Eurosatory, a large land warfare conference in Paris, the service was in the final stages of signing — if it had not already signed — an agreement with Israel to figure out how to integrate its Trophy system onto a US Army combat vehicle.
Trophy — a combined hostile fire detection and active protection system for vehicles — was designed and manufactured by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems for the Israeli government and has performed exceptionally well during border patrols in the Gaza Strip as well as during Operation Protective Edge in 2014, according to Rafael representatives at Eurosatory.
Rafael showed videos of the system in action at its booth, particularly one of Trophy countering an RPG in the close quarters of an urban environment. After what appears to be a d