What the Army learned from its first all-digital ground vehicle design

The Army is betting on digital engineering to save time and money as it develops its new infantry combat vehicle.  

“XM-30 is being built through a modular open standard that allows us, in theory, to more rapidly replace components, which allows us to modernize more quickly,” Maj. Gen. Glenn Dean, the program executive officer for ground combat systems, told Defense One during an interview. 

The Army has traditionally deployed an updated combat vehicle “about every 10 years,” Dean said. “Some of that's driven by the industrial timelines of what it takes to stand up the supply chain in the factory and building the vehicle, but some of that's because the way we have architected software in the past is not as flexible.”

By leaning on digital engineering—a practice the Army has been embracing more broadly—the Army can spot deficiencies in vehicle designs sooner. The XM-30 is the service’s latest effort to replace the M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle. The Army in 2023 selected two contractors, Rheinmetall Vehicles and General Dynamics Land Systems, to produce prototypes for the XM-30. The contracts are worth about $1.6 billion. 

The XM-30 program, formerly called the Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle, is the Army’s first  ground combat vehicle designed completely digitally, Dean said. And by using modular open system architecture, different systems from different vendors can be put together—and work seamlessly—on the same platform. 

“We are actually building the stand-in capability. So it's not the final XM-30, but it's a surrogate for it that will allow us to test that,” Dean said. 

That demonstrator platform will allow each contractor to install and change out their systems to see how quickly it can be done. 

“And that's tied to our digital acquisition, digital engineering effort, which XM-30 is a born-digital program. All of its design work is essentially being done in the cloud, tied to model-based assessment,” he said. 

“We have unprecedented insight into [the] level of design, level of detail, level of interaction between the components and the design, all the way from preliminary design through how we validate and test whether all the performance parameters we specify we are actually going to achieve.” 

But before contractors can build physical XM-30 prototypes to test, the Army needs to finalize the vehicle’s design through a critical design review in fiscal year 2025. 

“This is the first time we've taken a complete system through that level of design in a purely digital space,” he said. “We've learned quite a bit based on the amount of insight we're getting through that digital process. A little bit frightening, because we learn we know a lot more than we ever did before. Before we do these design reviews, everybody would get in the room for a week, and we'd go through the 500-PowerPoint slide presentation about every system on the platform. And you thought you saw how everything interrelated. Now, we're seeing we didn't. There's a lot of holes in our knowledge that we now actually can see live in real time. And so we believe we're getting to the end product, a better end product sooner than we were before.”

Dean said there’s still work to be done to realize digital engineering’s benefits, but the goal is for the combat vehicle industrial base to “match what we've seen in the commercial space.” 

“We're building new tools. We're building new relationships. XM-30 is kind of unique in that in some ways, it's highly joint—they are using Air Force software development tools in the Space Force cloud, using a bunch of best practices that we adopted from some Navy development programs. So we've really benefited from the total force modernization,” Dean said. “We're training, now, people to operate in a digital environment, and that, I think, is going to pay us forward for generations.”