Get a grip, the Army Futures Command chief said: It’s way too early to start second-guessing the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program.

The Ripsaw design is so flexible, the company claims, it can scale up and down for different missions.

Industry’s prototype Robotic Combat Vehicles are proving more capable than the Army expected, Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman told me: “It is really exciting.”

The Army will sacrifice some protection to fit two NGCVs on one Air Force C-17.

“It doesn’t have to be a tank, it just has to be decisive and lethal,” Brig. Gen. Richard Ross Coffman answered. “If that is run by a flux capacitor, hovers, and has a ray gun — and we can make it run at a reasonable cost — we’ll look at it.”

The Google Car and Tesla Autopilot have blazed a trail for the future Army. Both robotics technology and Army thinking have come a long way since 2009, when Defense Secretary Bob Gates cancelled the massive Future Combat Systems program. Where FCS tried to invent new technology on a schedule for 19 different manned and unmanned… Keep reading →

“Recent guidance from Army senior leadership has us looking at, emphasizing, Bradley replacement,” Miller told reporters in a conference call. “What we have now done is moved to accelerate our optionally manned fighting vehicle, the Bradley replacement, and we want to be able to focus on that.”

What mission does the Army really need armed robots for — expendable scouts, perhaps, or supplementary fire support? And does buying robots for that role really offer more tactical value than spending the same money on mundane upgrades to, say, self-propelled artillery?

The new combat vehicles must be “optimized for fighting in dense urban terrain.” Fighting in narrow streets, in turn, requires smaller vehicles than the massive M1 — and one way to reduce weight is to take the humans out.