Army announces $4 billion contract for new combat vehicles

The Interim Armored Vehicle (IAV)

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Army took an important step Friday toward transforming itself for future conflicts, announcing the award of a $4 billion contract for new wheeled combat vehicles. At the same time, it acknowledged that plans for fielding the new vehicles with infantry units will be delayed by more than a year.

Lt. Gen. Paul Kern, military deputy to the Army's chief weapons buyer, said the new vehicle will make infantry units lighter, more mobile and better suited to conflicts expected in the post-Cold War era.

"We are now under way to transform the U.S. Army for the 21st century," Kern told a Pentagon news conference.

The vehicle, called the Interim Armored Vehicle, is not meant as a substitute for the tank but as a prototype for a radically different combat vehicle that is barely on the drawing boards. The Army chose to invest the $4 billion for an interim solution so that it could get started now on making the myriad other changes -- in training and doctrine, for example -- that will complete the transformation effort.

"It is not the final answer, by a long shot," Kern said. He noted that while the Interim Armored Vehicle is expected to be used for 30 years, it is being built mainly with off-the-shelf technology. Scientific research is under way to develop the combat vehicle that the Army hopes to have by 2010.

Heavy tanks, the backbone of Army forces for decades, will be retained and even upgraded. In the meantime, a newly established force called a brigade combat team is being created to give the Army more quick-response capability than it has ever had. For at least the next decade, the centerpiece of these teams will be the Interim Armored Vehicle, and they will not include tanks.

The Interim Armored Vehicle uses tires instead of traditional steel tracks. As to whether the Army eventually would abandon tracked vehicles entirely, Kern said, "That is still an open question."

Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, had hoped the first brigade combat team would be equipped with the Interim Armored Vehicle, or IAV, by December 2001. Kern disclosed Friday that the timetable has been set back 16 months because more testing and development is needed.

"The chief is not happy with the schedule," Kern said.

The $4 billion contract was awarded to a partnership of General Dynamics Corp. and General Motors Corp. They are to deliver 2,131 of the eight-wheeled vehicles by 2008. The work will be done in Anniston, Alabama; Sterling Heights, Michigan; Lima, Ohio; Peoria, Illinois; Indianapolis, Indiana; and in Canada at London, Ontario.

The Army had received bids that included both wheeled and tracked vehicles, but chose the wheeled version. It runs quieter than a tracked vehicle and can transport a nine-man infantry squad at speeds up to 60 mph. It also is transportable in a C-130 cargo plane, a requirement necessary to meet Shinseki's goal of having combat teams that can deploy anywhere in the world within four days.

The vehicle will come in two basic configurations: as an infantry carrier and as a mobile gun system.

Its infantry carrier configuration will present four other variants: for battlefield reconnaissance, as a mobile command post, as a mortar carrier and to coordinate supporting fire from artillery.

The mobile gun configuration also will have four other variants: for an engineer squad, for medical evacuation, for anti-tank fire and for detecting and identifying nuclear, biological and chemical agents on the battlefield. Development work on this configuration will take an extra two years, Kern said.

Kern said the IAV is the first new combat vehicle the Army has bought since the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in the 1980s.

Copyright 2000 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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