The goal is to develop lighter, more lethal, and survivable ground vehicles. The use of composite and titanium-based materials will make future combat vehicles lighter, more easily deployed, versatile, and survivable. These technologies are key to optimizing and exploiting structural integrity, durability, ballistic protection, repairability, and signature reduction. Future vehicle chassis and turrets will be fabricated to integrate advanced designs using a combination of lightweight structures and modular armor packages. Using composite materials or titanium as the primary structure in a combat vehicle is new and there are significant technical challenges.
Issues related to composite materials include durability, producibility, and repairability.
The primary issue for titanium is its high cost, which has so far kept it from being used on any U.S. combat vehicles. The goal of integrated survivability is to protect ground vehicles from a proliferation of advanced threats. Hit avoidance, detection avoidance, penetration avoidance, and damage reduction technologies are critical to achieving overall vehicle survivability. Hit avoidance technologies confuse or physically affect incoming threats. ECM and improved sensors are the key elements.