Army may slow down procurement of new light reconnaissance vehicle.

• Author: Harper, Jon

The Army is looking to procure a new scout vehicle for infantry units. But funding constraints and other priorities could hold the project back as the service pushes forward with its modernization plans.

The Army is undertaking an effort to restore "tactical mobility" to its infantry brigade combat teams, according to service officials. This includes equipping air assault forces with all-terrain "ground mobility vehicles," or GMVs. But the unarmored trucks would create operational concerns.

Lt. Col. Scott Coulson, chief of the maneuver branch at the Army Capabilities Integration Center, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), said the GMV would not have much survivability.

If there's a bad guy "with a machine gun and here comes 12 GMVs, that's going to be a very bad day" for us, he said.

To prevent infantry units from unknowingly moving into the enemy's crosshairs, the Army hopes to equip cavalry squadrons with light recon vehicles, also known as LRVs.

"LRV is intended to fill the capability gap right now inside the reconnaissance squadron," Coulson said. "In the infantry brigade combat team, we do not have a dedicated platform that is capable of rapid mobile reconnaissance and fighting ...to support expeditionary missions."

Ted Maciuba, deputy director of mounted requirements at the Army's Maneuver Center of Excellence, said the LRV needs to be able to conduct "reconnaissance by fire."

The vehicles need to have the lethality necessary to lay down suppression fire, and also the ability to call in artillery or close-air support against heavily armed foes, he said.

The Humvee--the service's workhorse vehicle--can't get the job done, officials said.

"We're looking for something that has better mobility than the current Humvee has right now," Maciuba said. "We're looking for something that has a significantly improved lethality, perhaps to the point of a medium-caliber weapon, [and] we're looking for something that has the protection necessary so that it can survive" when it encounters the enemy.

The Army wants a six-person vehicle that can be sling-loaded or, ideally, carried internally on a CH-47 Chinook troop transport helicopter. It also wants something that can store a suite of command-and-control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems, officials said.

The Army hosted a light recon vehicle platform performance demonstration at Fort Benning, Georgia, in August. A number of industry players'...