The Army’s Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle program represents a rare convergence of engineering ambition, doctrinal necessity, and acquisition difficulty. Industry was first invited to sketch concepts in mid 2021 when five teams were selected to produce digital designs for a Bradley replacement, a deliberate pivot toward an open, iterative development model intended to coax industry to define what is feasible rather than force-fit requirements onto existing platforms.
Prototype testing, properly conceived, is more than a checklist of mobility runs and lethality shots. Prototypes are hypotheses embodied in steel, software, sensors, and networks. They are experiments that must answer layered questions about survivability, human machine teaming, logistical footprint, and the vehicle s behavior when autonomy and remote operation are stressed under duress. The Army s current approach has emphasized digital design and modeling in early phases to reduce risk and accelerate iteration, and that modeling work has driven conversations about architecture, modularity, and the implications of optional manning.
A quick history lesson is salutary. An earlier attempt to prototype a direct Bradley replacement was effectively canceled in 2020 after industry provided only a single viable prototype bid, prompting the Army to rethink requirements and process. The lesson from that episode is blunt. If your procurement strategy by itself discourages robust competition you will not get a plurality of concepts to test. Prototype tests are meaningless if they validate only a single vendor s assumptions.
As of mid 2023 physical prototyping had not yet become the dominant phase of the program. The Army s program timeline, as publicly discussed in 2022, anticipated a later prototyping window to allow for more mature digital designs and for the service to refine test objectives. That delay is prudent in one sense. Digital engineering can reveal whole classes of failure modes long before a crane lifts the first hull. But it is dangerous in another. Simulation cannot fully replicate contested electromagnetic environments, human stress under fire, or the compounding cascade of failures that emerge when sensors, networks, and actuators interact in the real world. A disciplined prototyping schedule must therefore be both early enough to discover system level surprises and iterative enough to incorporate lessons quickly.
Technical directions emerging from the concept phase are already consequential. Army leaders have publicly noted an inclination toward hybrid electric propulsion across contending designs, driven by logistics and energy considerations observed in recent conflicts. Hybrid systems promise reduced fuel strain, improved tactical mobility, and new options for silent mobility and onboard power for directed energy or electronic warfare payloads. Those advantages come at a cost in complexity and thermal management, both of which must be central to prototype testing agendas. Mobility trials alone are not sufficient. Thermal signature, electrical load management, and maintainability under field conditions are equally critical to validate.
If the OMFV is indeed optionally manned then prototype tests must attend to the unique human factors of that design choice. Optional manning multiplies the modes of operation. Crews will sometimes ride inside, sometimes control remotely, and sometimes operate in hybrid arrangements where local autonomy handles vehicle control while humans direct tactical decisions. Prototype tests must stress transitions between these modes. How long does it take to get the vehicle from remote control to manned operation while under enemy fire? How does latency over degraded communications affect gunnery and maneuver? How do soldiers inside a moving platform interpret and trust autonomy driven target cues? These are not esoteric queries. They will determine doctrine and rules of engagement as surely as any armor thickness or gun caliber. Ethnographic tests, live drills with infantry and vehicle crews, and red team exercises that intentionally degrade comms must be integral to any prototyping plan. No amount of lab verification will substitute for them.
Procedurally, the program s emphasis on open modular architectures is welcome because it allows incremental upgrades and competitive inserts during later testing and production. But modularity itself is a test vector. Interfaces leak, software mismatches create brittle behaviors, and a system that is sufficiently open to accept plug in payloads can also be sufficiently open to be brittle under adversary electronic attack. Prototype testing must therefore include hostile interference scenarios, cyber resilience evaluations, and fault insertion trials where subsystems are forced to fail in realistic sequences. The goal is not zero failure. It is graceful degradation and predictable recovery.
There is also a moral and legal contour to prototyping armored systems that incorporate autonomy and remote operation. Tests should examine accountability chains during semi autonomous engagements. Who is responsible when an autonomous targeting aid misclassifies a civilian structure or when latency causes a misfire? Prototype tests offer the practical venue to stress protocol, to log decision trees, and to rehearse clear human override procedures. Treating those rehearsals as mere ethics theater is a mistake. They reveal design shortcomings and operational hazards that otherwise surface tragically in combat.
Finally, the virtue of prototyping is not speed alone. It is disciplined iteration coupled to transparent evaluation criteria and robust competition. The 2020 pause in prototyping is a warning that poor acquisition design can strangle competition. Digital design and modeling are necessary but not sufficient. The Army must schedule prototypes that expose systems to contested networks, hybrid propulsion stresses, and real soldiers under pressure. It must enforce comparative trials so that empirical data, not marketing, drives selection. Without that empirical rigor the OMFV risks becoming an aggregation of desirable features that have not been proven to coexist in the rigors of war.
Prototype tests are where promises meet physics. If the goal is to field an optionally manned vehicle that truly changes the risk calculus for soldiers then the tests must be honest, adversarial, and multidisciplinary. They must measure more than sprint times and armor penetration. They must measure trust, repairability, resilience to interference, and the human cost of system complexity. Those measures will determine whether optional manning is a transformative step or an expensive extension of vulnerability. The difference will be decided in the dust and noise of prototype trials, not in glossy briefings.