When will the Army embrace hybrid-electric vehicles? 

The Army has long tinkered with the idea of making some of its vehicles electric or hybrid, and while the technology has become commonplace in the commercial vehicle industry, the service has yet to jump on the bandwagon.

As officials hedge their bets, companies have continued to put technology in front of the service in order to show the purported benefits, arguing that the technology is ready for prime time in the Army’s modernization plans.

MACK Defense has brought a commercial, fully electric, medium-duty truck to the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference this week to keep the conversation about hybrid capabilities with the service going, the company’s CEO David Hartzell told Defense News.

Bringing the truck represents MACK’s overall push to prove that hybrid technology is ready for military prime time, Hartzell said. The company is participating in the U.S. Army’s competition for a new Common Tactical Truck and, while it is not a requirement for the CTT to have hybrid power, it is the only competitor to build hybrid prototypes for evaluation.

“This is a vehicle customers can come and buy today. They’re operating on streets around the country today,” Hartzell said.

General Dynamics Land Systems again has brought a hybrid-electric Stryker combat vehicle to the show designed to be a command post where silent watch is a critical component achieved by turning off the engine but still powering communications equipment.

GM Defense is featuring a diesel-powered, electric Next Generation Tactical Vehicle at AUSA as well.

“GM has invested billions into battery technology, battery plants to drive the cost of batteries down, to drive the size of batteries smaller, lighter and the power up,” JD Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development, told Defense News during a trip to Milford Proving Ground, Michigan.

Defense News drove the new tactical vehicle, which uses the Chevy Silverado truck with the same Duramax engine in the U.S. Army’s Infantry Squad Vehicle, paired with an electric battery capable of producing roughly 300 kilowatt hours of power output with a 15-gallon fuel tank. The vehicle still takes JP-8, the fuel choice of comfort for the U.S. Army.

GM Defense had wanted to compete in an Army competition to build an Electric Light Reconnaissance Vehicle. The Army said it was ready to start a prototyping program last fall, but that program was abruptly canceled.

“I think one of the challenges out there is there is still not a lot of understanding and knowledge in this space,” said Pete Johnson, GM Defense vice president of business development for integrated vehicles.

Company executives hope the Next-Generation Tactical Vehicle prototype can help address lingering concerns.

The Army has evaluated the possibility of converting even combat vehicles like the Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle for hybrid propulsion, an effort led by the service’s Rapid Capabilities and Critical Technologies Office.

Industry teams now designing a Bradley replacement, dubbed the XM30 Mechanized Infantry Combat Vehicle, bank on hybrid capability in their proposals, though nothing is expected to come to fruition until the 2030s.

Money and priorities

The Army maintains that just because it hasn’t fully committed to hybrid capabilities in tactical or combat vehicles doesn’t mean the service is disinterested.

“It’s not a hard sell to anyone in the Army,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told Defense News. “I think wheeled vehicles is our biggest opportunity. It’s the same exact tech that’s all over the commercial sector now. A lot of people drive these cars. It’s becoming kind of normal.”

The Army is “just working on carving out the money to do it,” Bush said. “Wheeled vehicles is a thing that we’ve been challenged to maintain really high production rates on, and it’s just competing with a lot of other needs in the Army,” he said.

While the investment is significant up front, “the long-term payoff, even a 10-15% fuel reduction, multiplied times a bazillion vehicles, is huge,” Bush said. “If we do this right, it’ll free up money down the road because we’re being more efficient with the vehicles.”

The capabilities a hybrid vehicle would bring are also becoming increasingly important in the modern battlefield where silent watch and silent drive help U.S. troops evade detection by increasingly sophisticated sensors.

“Industry is doing so much good research in this area, we don’t have to develop it,” Bush said. “We just need to make sure it’s safe.”

But introducing the technology to the Army’s vast inventory of ground vehicles still comes with challenges, according to Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, program executive officer for ground combat systems.

“Hybrid brings a bunch of things: extended range from the same amount of fuel, silent drive, the ability to export power or to use generated power differently to provide more mission capability,” Dean said.

“The challenge going back to the current fleet is it’s very expensive to do the equivalent of a heart transplant on a combat vehicle like that,” Dean said. For the Stryker program, for example, it cost $450 million and took eight years just to upgrade an engine and power train.

“And that’s a much simpler problem than converting a vehicle from purely internal combustion to hybrid-electric,” Dean explained.

“I would love to have hybrid-electric projects on all of our combat platforms, but the reality is we probably can’t afford to do that, so we have to be very pointed in where we apply it,” he said.