When will the Army adopt hybrid electric vehicles?

The Army has long toyed with the idea of ​​making some of its vehicles electric or hybrid, and while the technology has become commonplace in the commercial vehicle industry, the service has yet to jump on the bandwagon.

As officials hedge their bets, companies have continued to put technology ahead of the service in order to showcase the purported benefits, arguing that the technology is ready to be highlighted in the Army’s modernization plans.

MACK Defense brought a commercial, all-electric, mid-duty truck to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week to keep the conversation going about hybrid capabilities with the service, company CEO David Hartzell told Defense News.

Bringing the truck represents MACK’s overall effort to prove that hybrid technology is ready for military prime time, Hartzell said. The company is participating in the US Army’s competition for a new Common Tactical Truck and, although it is not mandatory for the CTT to have hybrid power, it is the only competitor building hybrid prototypes for evaluation.

“This is a vehicle that customers can buy today. They are operating on the streets across the country today,” Hartzell said.

General Dynamics Land Systems again brought a Stryker hybrid-electric combat vehicle to the show, designed to be a command post where silent surveillance is a critical component achieved by turning off the engine but still powering the communications equipment.

GM Defense is also showcasing a next-generation diesel-powered electric tactical vehicle at AUSA.

“GM has invested billions in battery technology, battery factories to reduce the cost of batteries, to make batteries smaller, lighter and more powerful,” said JD Johnson, vice president of business development at GM. GM Defense told Defense News during a trip to Milford Proving Ground, Michigan.

Defense News drove the new tactical vehicle, which uses the Chevy Silverado truck with the same Duramax engine as the U.S. Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle, paired with an electric battery capable of producing about 300 kilowatt-hours of power with a tank of 15 gallon fuel. The vehicle also uses JP-8, the US Army’s fuel of choice.

GM Defense wanted to compete in an Army competition to build a Light Electric Reconnaissance Vehicle. The Army said it was ready to begin a prototyping program last fall, but that program was abruptly canceled.

“I think one of the challenges is that there’s still not a lot of understanding and knowledge in this space,” said Pete Johnson, vice president of business development for integrated vehicles at GM Defense.

Company executives hope the Next Generation Tactical Vehicle prototype can help resolve lingering concerns.

The Army has evaluated the possibility of converting even combat vehicles like the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle to hybrid propulsion, an effort led by the Force’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.

Industry teams now designing a Bradley replacement, dubbed the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Fighting Vehicle, are betting on hybrid capability in their proposals, although nothing is expected to materialize until the 2030s.

Money and priorities

The Army maintains that just because it has not fully committed to hybrid capabilities in tactical or combat vehicles does not mean the service is disinterested.

“It’s not hard to convince anyone in the Army,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News. “I think wheeled vehicles are our biggest opportunity. It’s exactly the same technology that is present throughout the commercial sector now. Many people drive these cars. It’s becoming kind of normal.”

The Army is “just working to get the money for this,” Bush said. “Wheeled vehicles are something that we’ve been challenged to maintain really high production rates on and are competing with a lot of other Army needs,” he said.

While the initial investment is significant, “the long-term payback, even a 10-15% reduction in fuel, multiplied across a gazillion vehicles, is huge,” Bush said. “If we do this right, we will free up money in the future because we will be more efficient with vehicles.”

The capabilities that a hybrid vehicle would bring are also becoming increasingly important on the modern battlefield, where silent surveillance and quiet driving help US troops evade detection by increasingly sophisticated sensors.

“The industry is doing so much good research in this area that we don’t need to develop it,” Bush said. “We just need to make sure it’s safe.”

But introducing the technology into the Army’s vast inventory of ground vehicles still presents challenges, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems.

“The hybrid brings a lot of things: extended range on the same amount of fuel, quiet driving, the ability to export power or use generated power differently to provide more mission capability,” Dean said.

“The challenge with returning to the current fleet is that it is very expensive to do the equivalent of a heart transplant in a combat vehicle like this,” Dean said. For the Stryker program, for example, it cost $450 million and took eight years just to upgrade one engine and powertrain.

“And this is a much simpler problem than converting a purely internal combustion vehicle to hybrid-electric,” Dean explained.

“I would love to have hybrid-electric designs on all of our combat platforms, but the reality is we probably can’t afford to do that, so we have to be very clear about where we apply them,” he said.