Design modularity, industrial specialization, and competitive advantage in armored vehicles

I love the way that Germans think. Looking for some intelligence the other day, I ran into this description of a new product by a company in Berlin:

        The modular-concept design... is puristic and foregoing: to be agile, maintenance free and mobile in urban space, it finds it is not necessary to have high-tech armament.

What’s entertaining is that the company is Dailybread Bicycles. Still, high-tech armament does come in many forms. As I have argued, roadside bombs and MRAP-type vehicles can be deemed strategic weapons. Roadside bombs were the only thing that could have created enough attrition to have driven the coalition prematurely from Iraq, and MRAPs were the essential response to that threat. Roadside bombs tend to be more operationally than technologically artful, but some of the features of blast-protection are quite technologically sophisticated.

This is shown in the market almost every week. As Defense Industry Daily reports today, the Austrian Bundesheer has ordered 150 “Multirole Light Vehicles” (MLVs) from Iveco for €104 million. DID quotes the website Army Technology on six design features by which the MLV provides “vastly improved protection” over that afforded by AM General’s Humvee. Most of it is standard-but-essential stuff:

• “The MLV’s wheel stations are located away from the crew cabin so that if a wheel detonates an antitank mine, the explosion is vented upwards, leaving the crew cabin undamaged.”
• “The bonnet is hinged to the chassis to reduce the shock transmitted to the cabin.”
• “The underside of the vehicle is v-shaped and the ground clearance has been maximised to allow maximum dissipation of the blast.”
• “The location of heavy components under the cabin floor has been avoided because they can be projected through the cabin floor by a mine blast.”

What’s competitively notable are two more items:

• “The light alloy rear body is fitted with a canvas roof over a supporting frame. It is sacrificial and severs from the cabin in the event of a mine detonation under a rear wheel.”

• “The lower part of the vehicle has a three-layer sandwich structure that collapses on detonation of a mine under the belly, absorbing a high percentage of the energy that has not been vented away laterally.”

As a marketer in the business once told me, sacrificing automotive parts to save body parts is a key design strategy for all blast-protected vehicle builders. In this case, though, Iveco has made the whole back half of the vehicle sacrificial—something that would be more difficult to do with a rear-exit troop carrier. The multilayer sandwich is a further sophistication: most of the vehicles on the market rely primarily the right grade and thickness in that v-shaped steel. That is changing, of course. KMW has built its Dingos with a flexible undercarriage for some time, Force Protection has recently begun selling its composite Force Armor, and more than a few others are working on their solutions beyond simple steel.

It’s also notable who’s building these vehicles. Iveco, KMW, Force Protection, and the OMC division of BAE Systems have all had considerable success, but none are known particularly for their electronics integration capabilities. Time was, the Pentagon chose Boeing and SAIC to run the US Army’s Future Combat System program because electronics integration was thought a capability more central to the task than automotive design. Lockheed Martin joined Armor Holdings (now BAE Systems M&PS) in a bid to build the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) on the strength of what it knew about electronics. Northrop Grumman has tried to enter the land vehicles business in the same way.

At issue is that supposed centrality of electronics. The JLTV is quite analogous in purpose to the MLV, and probably not greatly more electronically sophisticated than an infantry fighting vehicle, such as the CV90 or LAV-III. Generally, though, the companies that build the vehicles are not those that build the weapon stations, sensors, radios, or turrets. BAE Systems Hägglunds has built a whole business model from offering the turrets for offset in export deals. Kongsberg and Rafael lead the business in remote weapon stations, but neither makes tanks.

This works because vehicle electronics, sensors, land weapons, and armored vehicles are relatively modular technologies with readily specified, standardized interfaces. In that sort of technological regime, the more successful companies tend to be those that specialize in one portion of the value chain, as Kongsberg and Hägglunds (quite separately) do. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, or Northrop Grumman could theoretically begin working more directly in automotive design and assembly, but there is no clear evidence yet that electronics integration and computer coding experience would be competitively advantageous for that. Rather, knowing how to build a high-quality, durable, off-road vehicle, and how to protect the troops with a good blast-absorbing shield, look rather more important for the time being.