A collaboration that has what the Army needs for the Common Tactical Truck

Photo courtesy of American Rheinmetall Vehicles.

GM Defense and American Rheinmetall Vehicles (ARV) have joined forces to compete for the Army’s Common Tactical Truck (CTT) program in a rapid-prototyping effort to provide truck operators with modernized capabilities and commonality with commercial trucking.

In this Q&A with Steve duMont, president of GM Defense, he discusses the capabilities of the GM Defense/ARV team, its speed-to-market abilities, and its commitment to bring a modern, all-American truck with enhanced capabilities to soldiers.

Q. Why did GMD enter into a teaming agreement with ARV to build the CTT prototype?

duMont: The CTT teaming agreement between GM Defense and American Rheinmetall Vehicles brings together two powerhouse companies, both with long legacies in the defense market, that can bring next-generation capability to a high-priority Army modernization program. Our two businesses are aligned in our commitment to provide a transformational prototype to the U.S. Army as they modernize the heavy tactical vehicle fleet. With American Rheinmetall Vehicles’ proven and fielded HX3 as the starting point of our offering, combined with GM Defense’s ability to leverage advanced technologies and U.S. manufacturing capabilities of our parent company, General Motors, we make a strong team that can work quickly to get modern capabilities into the hands of our soldiers.

Q. What advantages does the collaboration bring to the U.S. Army?

duMont: The collaboration will bring forward the HX3-CTT, a new next-generation variant of the globally successful HX family of military-off-the-shelf tactical trucks. The advanced vehicle possesses an extremely high level of commonality and modularity across variants, including cargo, load handling systems, tankers and line haul tractors. The common platform approach offers the Army critical benefits enabling a more reliable, more efficient and more mission ready logistics truck fleet that can easily flex to support future needs. The next-generation prototype will leverage commercial technologies that provide enhanced capabilities, while offering the Army additional benefits such as cost savings, the flexibility to adopt technologies from adjacent commercial truck fleets and a larger global supply chain for spare parts.

Q. GM Defense has been very vocal about transitioning defense and government customers to a more electric, autonomous and connected future. How does supporting an ICE-powered program like CTT factor into its electrification efforts?

duMont: While we’re completely aligned with our parent company’s vision for an all-electric future, we are not walking away from ICE-powered solutions. GM produces some of the most powerful and fuel-efficient diesel engines on the market. We recognize that the transition to a more electric, autonomous and connected future is a journey where alternative propulsion systems and ICE engines will co-exist for many years. GM Defense will continue to leverage traditional power and propulsion technologies to meet customer requirements and we will support our customer where they are on their pathway towards electrification.

Photo courtesy of American Rheinmetall Vehicles.

Q. CTT is being initiated by the Army as a rapid prototyping effort under a middle-tier acquisition strategy to facilitate faster requirements generation and development timelines that should allow for a more accelerated transition from prototype to low-rate production procurement. How will ARV and GM Defense meet the Army’s need for speed?

duMont: The Army selected GM Defense to deliver the Infantry Squad Vehicle under an Other Transaction Authority contract. Since winning the contract, we’ve reached a number of milestones with impressive speed and agility. GM Defense delivered the first production ISV 120 days after contract award and has successfully fielded additional vehicles to the 82nd and 101st Army Airborne Divisions.

We’ve also expanded on the success of the ISV by building out an ISV family of vehicles, some of which have been developed in a matter of weeks, from concept to prototype vehicle, thanks to our ability to leverage tested and validated commercial technology. The HX3-CTT that we plan to build and produce with ARV leverages a high percentage of commercial technology, which we believe will give our team the advantage of speed and flexibility to meet the needs of the Army now and into the future.

AUSA 2022

AUSA 2022

Over at Rheinmetall's booth sat the hefty Lynx OMFV (Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle). The company, as its competitors, is hoping to make a strong impression as the Army looks for OMFV proposals later this fall -- the early stage of an almost certainly lucrative long-term contract award. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

All the way from down under, the Australian firm Defendtex presented some of its modular UAVs. Here visitors can see the Drone155, which the company says can be outfitted with ISR payloads or explosives. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

The MVPP from Globe Tech stands for Modular Vehicle Protection Platform, a vehicle add-on that can take the brunt of improvised explosive device detonations. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

AUSA was well attended by international officers and officials as well, and by foreign defense firms. The Korean booth, shown here, featured some products hoping to make a splash in the US military. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

Not your traditional defense contractor, the computing giant IBM has a booth at AUSA showing off its flashy but functional quantum computer. The US government as a whole, and the Pentagon in particular, are heavily invested in the quantum computing race with the likes of China. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

Among the fleet of vehicles parked throughout the AUSA floor for display was the Flyer 72-U, made by General Dynamics. The company says the vehicle takes a "modular approach" so it can be configured for anything from "light strike assault" to rescue and evacuation. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

The stuff of counter-UAS nightmares, the Virginia-based BlueHalo firm makes drone swarms that use AI and machine learning to provide battlefield intelligence to soldiers. The Army's Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office awarded the company $14 million in February to develop the HIVE. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

It's a .50 caliber Gatling gun, one that Dillon Aero says can fire 1,500 shots per minute, or 25 rounds per second. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

For this year's show AM General rolled its own Humvee Saber, Blade Edition, onto the floor. The company claims "leap-ahead" technology for a light tactical vehicle. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

Patria, a defense firm owned jointly by Finland and Norway's Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace, made it's way across the Atlantic for AUSA 2022, bringing along its AMV multi-role vehicle. The AMV was recently purchased by the dozens by Slovakia and its home country of Finland. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

At the Pratt Miller Defense booth, visitors will see a full-sized Expeditionary Modular Autonomous Vehicle (EMAV) is the "newest and perhaps most mobile and lethal" of the company's autonomous offerings. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

Marathon's Autonomous Robot Targets are exactly what that sounds like: shooting targets guided by computer code and designed to "look, move, and even behave like people," the company says. The robots were on the move on the AUSA floor -- though no shooting was allowed. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

The AUSA show floor offered a fresh look at a futuristic version of an old Army standby: the Abrams tank. This one, the Abrams X, is made by General Dynamics Land Systems, manufacturers of the current Abrams M1A1 and M1A2 battle tanks used by the US Army. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

Attendees may walk by model versions of the famous Iron Dome system, in use for years in Israel, and its sister SkyCeptor system, both made by Rafael. The SkyCeptor, in particular, is meant to "defeat short- to medium-range ballistic and cruise missiles and other advanced air defense threats," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

As the need for counter-UAS systems explodes, Epirus is at AUSA repping its counter-electronics system Stryker Leonidas, made with General Dynamics. The system's "counter-swarm" weapon "fills a pressing short range air defense (SHORAD) capability gap," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

A new unveiling for AUSA, Rheinmetall announced this week the Mission Master CXT platform, the newest addition to the company's "family" of autonomous ground vehicles. The company says the CXT "combines the power of a diesel engine with a silent electric motor." (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).

The GMC Hummer EV Platform, the first vehicle on GM's New Ultium EV Platform, goes on display at AUSA 2022. All-electric offerings are the center of much of the Army's attention these days as it aims to electrify its non-tactical, and eventually tactical, fleet. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)

Two new Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicles (AMPV) sit at the booth by Bae Systems. The vehicles are meant to replace the Army's venerable, but old M113s. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)

Palantir shows off its prototype for the Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) vehicle. The company says the TITAN "will be the critical backbone that provides correlation, fusion, and integration of sensor data alongside insights from AI/ML overlaid at the tactical edge." In other words, it's meant to find the signal in the noise. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)

A model of a "modernized" Boeing Apache AH-64E shown Association of US Army Conference in 2022. While the Army is about to choose two new airframes, there's currently no Apache replacement on the horizon. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)

Lockheed Martin teamed up with Sikorsky to produce the Raider X, the team's competitor in the Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program, one of two high-profile Army Future Vertical Lift contests currently underway. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)

The Bell 360 Invictus is the other FARA competitor, looking to beat out the Lockheed-Sikorsky team. The Army's expected to make its decision in fiscal 2024. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)

The defense start-up Anduril has expanded its footprint in the defense market in recent years. This product, the Mobile Sentry, "brings autonomous fixed site counter UAS and counter intrusion capabilities into a mobile form factor," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith)

The military's no-so-furry friendly robot dogs are back at AUSA this year. This model, called the Vision 60 Q-UGV from Ghost Robotics, is an "all-weather ground robot for use in a broad range of unstructured urban and natural environments for defense, homeland and enterprise applications," the company says. (Breaking Defense/Brendon Smith).