AUSA 2012: US Army Chief shares GCV vision

24 February 2012 - by Scott Gourley – Shepardmedia.com

Fort Lauderdale, USA - Speaking AUSA Winter 2012, Army Chief of Staff Gen Raymond Odierno reiterated his support and shared his vision for the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) programme.

‘The Ground Combat Vehicle is a replacement for the Infantry Fighting Vehicle,’ he explained. ‘Why do we need that? Well, first of all, as we’ve done the analysis over the last seven or eight years with Bradley, first it hasn’t done very well surviving. In fact, of all of our combat platforms we’ve lost more Bradleys than any other combat platform. We haven’t used a Bradley in five years. So it has some survivability issues.’

He continued, ‘The Stryker – We had to put so much weight on the Stryker right now that we can’t get it off the darn roads.’

‘So we’ve got a problem with our infantry fighting vehicles,’ he said. ‘The GCV is us trying to solve that problem. Everybody seems to say that GCV is going to be a heavy infantry fighting vehicle. I don’t know that. I’m not committed to that. The way we set this up is that we have two contractors that are now conducting some analysis on how to build a GCV. Then at the end there will be other vehicles off the shelf that we will bring in to compare to it – to include a more improved Bradley and Stryker. And we will decide where we are going to go.’

‘This is about an infantry fighting vehicle – it’s about survivability and mobility, and the tradeoff between the two. I want a system where we have flexibility; where I get to choose how much survivability we put on – the commander on the ground gets the opportunity to choose how much mobility and how much survivability he needs. I want a system that we can incrementally improve, where we can incrementally add technologies in order to improve it, so as we go forward I don’t have to buy a new infantry fighting vehicle; I can incrementally improve it; like we did with the M1 tank back in the 1970s. It’s still the best tank in the world in 2012, because of the incremental improvements we were able to make with the technologies as they became available,’ he said.

‘I’m not dreaming about technologies that aren’t out there,’ he observed. ‘What I’m depending on is that every few years we continue to develop new technologies that we will be able to add on to our key systems – and that’s key as we move forward.’