No Trophy for FCS, Iraq Troops – Raytheon HTK APS Selected

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Trophy on Merkava(click to view full) As part of the USA’s $120+ billion “Future Combat Systems” program, BAE Systems has awarded a phased subcontract worth up to $70 million to Raytheon’s Network Centric Systems business in McKinney, TX, to develop the “hard-kill” Active Protection Subsystem (APS) for the U.S. Army’s FCS Manned Ground Vehicles (MGVs). “Hard-kill” elements include armor and counter-munitions against rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs), high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds, top attack munitions and tank-fired kinetic energy (KE) rounds. In contrast, “soft-kill” systems include electronic countermeasures such as jammers, smoke/obscurement, “signature reduction” multi-spectrum camouflage, and decoys. RPGs represent a ubiquitous threat, especially in urban warfare conditions that are found in theaters like Iraq or Iran and expected to be the “new baseline” for US forces. Countermeasures to date have mostly included “active armor,” which uses an outward-facing blast when hit that disrupts the warhead’s plasma jet; and/or slat armor, which detonates warheads before they hit the vehicle’s main armor and so “misfocuses” the shaped charge. Both systems can be defeated by dual warhead designs like the Russian RPG-27, however, which was recently forecast to have the largest share of international production in its class between 2006-2014. DefenseTech […]

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