The UK’s FRES Transformational Armored Vehicles

FRES-U finalists:
There can be… none?
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Despite SDSR survival, budgets may stop 2 FRES variants. (Jan 17/11)

Many of Britain’s army vehicles are old and worn, and the necessities of hard service on the battlefield are only accelerating that wear. The multi-billion pound “Future Rapid Effects System” (FRES) aims to recapitalize the core of Britain’s armored vehicle fleet over the next decade or more, filling many of the same medium armor roles as the Stryker Family of armored wheeled vehicles and/or the Future Combat Systems’ Manned Ground Vehicle family. Current estimates indicate a potential requirement for over 3,700 FRES vehicles, including utility and reconnaissance variants. Even so, one should be cautioned that actual numbers bought usually fall short of intended figures for early-stage defense programs.

The FRES program was spawned by the UK’s withdrawal from the German-Dutch-UK Boxer MRAV modular wheeled APC program, in order to develop a more deployable vehicle that fit Britain’s exact requirements. Those initial requirements were challenging, however, and experience in Iraq and Afghanistan led to decisions that changed a number of requirements. In the end, GD MOWAG’s Piranha V won the utility vehicle competition. FRES-U is not the end of the competition, however, or the contracts. In fact, FRES-U had the winning bidder’s preferred status revoked; that entire phase will now take a back seat to the FRS-SV scout version…

• FRES: The Program
• FRES: Contracts & Key Events [updated]
• Additional Readings
• Appendix 1 – The British Army’s Armored Vehicle Fleet, late 2006
• Appendix 2 – A New Procurement Approach: System House Challenges
• Appendix 3 – FRES: Key Challenges for the Contractors
• Appendix 4 – FRES Experiments: Electronic Architecture Contracts
• Appendix 5 – FRES Experiments: Vehicle-Related Contracts

Subscribe now to DII and keep reading about news and development with this story including:

• The details of the British Army's "largest ever" armaments program
• Heated debate as a result of operational lessons from the front lines in Afghanistan and Iraq
• Who competed for - and who won - the nine contracts issued
• Events and news chronology since the project was issued
• 13 photos, and links to corporate source materials from BAE, Boeing, Thales, General Dynamics, Nexter tabled data of British Army's armored fleet
• Appendices of FRES Experiments: Vehicle-Related TDPs, Electronic Architecture TDPs, and more

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