The Army is speeding up development work on its future Modular Active Protection System for combat vehicles.
As the service works on expediting interim solutions for combat vehicle Active Protection Systems, officials are simultaneously ramping up some of the first MAPS tests using soft-kill countermeasures. There is also a plan to begin using the first prototypes of a common controller toward the end of the year. Once the common controller is available, the Army will begin “layered testing,” mixing both soft-kill and hard-kill countermeasures, Col. Glenn Dean told Defense News in a March 27 interview at the Detroit Arsenal in Michigan.
Dean, who is the project manager for the Army’s Stryker Brigade Combat Team, has also been tasked with helping to execute force protection efforts.
The first phase of MAPS development will be completed in 2019, Erik Kallio, assistant associate director for Ground Systems Survivability, said in the same interview.
The Army is in the process of bridging near-term, off-the-shelf APS characterization work into the MAPS effort and then into a long-term program of record — the Vehicle Protection System (VPS) — in 2018. A future product manager has already been identified, Dean said.