• Rheinmetall's Boxer CRV has been down selected for Land 400 Phase 2. Credit: Rheinmetall
    Rheinmetall's Boxer CRV has been down selected for Land 400 Phase 2. Credit: Rheinmetall
  • Credit: Rheinmetall
    Credit: Rheinmetall
  • MBT with modern force protection packages. Credit: Rheinmetall
    MBT with modern force protection packages. Credit: Rheinmetall
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The first Boxer 8x8 Combat Reconnaissance Vehicle (CRV) to sport Australian camouflage was a focal point at Rheinmetall Defence's annual Land Forces Symposium in Germany, together with impressive day and night firepower demonstrations and some stimulating insights into the future development of armoured vehicles.

Julian Kerr | Unterlüss

While the two-day symposium at Rheinmetall’s Unterlüss proving ground was directed at the broad interests of participants from 32 countries, elements of the subject matter were directly relevant to several Australian programs, notably Land 400 Phases 2 and 3 (CRV and Infantry Fighting Vehicles), Land 17 Phase 1C.2 (155mm artillery ammunition), and Land 19 Phase 7B (Ground-Based Air Defence).

A further Australian connection was represented by New South Welshman Ben Hudson, a former Australian Army officer with wide industry experience who now sits on Rheinmetall Defence’s Executive Board and is CEO of the company’s newly formed Vehicle Systems division.

The division’s products range includes tracked vehicles, armoured wheeled vehicles, turret systems and military trucks, including the 2,536 medium and heavy vehicles being supplied to the ADF by Rheinmetall MAN Military Vehicles Australia under Project Land 121 Phase 3B.

The static display at Unterluess included an armoured steel cab similar to those that will be fitted to what informed sources say will be slightly less than half of the Phase 3B 4x4 and 8X8 trucks.

Manufactured in Germany, the protected cabs will be married with truck chassis in the Brisbane area by Penske Commercial Vehicles.

Needless to say, Hudson confirmed to ADM that the additional 1,000 vehicle training fleet proposed under Land 121 Phase 5B was of keen interest to the company.


 

"Participants at the Land Forces conference in Adelaide in early September would have the opportunity to get up close and personal with a Boxer in the CRV configuration."

 


Trucks were no longer simply transport; “they’re now protected C4I nodes on the battlefield”, he commented.

In a separate presentation, Hudson stressed the need to ensure that requirements for any vehicle system were correct at the outset.

Urgent operational upgrades in recent years had resulted in compromises affecting numerous militaries – design limits exceeded, reliability and mobility degraded, inadequate through-life support, and unsatisfactory training.

Vehicle systems therefore needed to be effective for more than 25 years and capable of rapid adaption as threats and needs evolved.

This required modularity, open electronic architecture and space, together with payload and power reserves to accommodate enhancements – all features of the Boxer 8x8 proposed by Rheinmetall Defence for the Land 400 Phase 2 CRV requirement, Hudson noted.

Also at Unterlüss, Gary Stewart, Chief Operations Officer for Rheinmetall Defence Australia, disclosed that participants at the Land Forces conference in Adelaide in early September would have the opportunity to get up close and personal with a Boxer in the CRV configuration, whether or not a decision had been announced by then on shortlisted tenderers.

Dispatch of the two other vehicles required for ADF test and evaluation would depend on whether Boxer had made the cut.

Of these, the second was currently being evaluated by German road authorities to ease the way for Australian roadworthiness approval, while the third was undergoing baseline integration testing.

Shortlisted tenderers are required to provide training for ADF test drivers, a gunnery instructor from the School of Armour and a maintainer from the Logistics Training Centre, and this would take place in Germany should Boxer be selected, Stewart said.

“It makes sense,” Stewart said. “We’ve got the Unterluess range close by, and the Australians will be able to draw on the experience of their German Army counterparts, although both Bundeswehr and Dutch Army Boxers are equipped with remote weapon stations rather than turrets.”

This could change, though. Stewart disclosed that interest was now being shown by several European customers in a turreted Boxer variant as a result of the work carried out for the Australian requirement.

The two-man Lance digital turret mounts a 30mm gun with programmable airburst ammunition and a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun, along with the ROSY smoke obscurant system.

Stewart disclosed that the options included in the company’s CRV tender included Rheinmetall’s Active Defence System and dual Spike or Javelin anti-tank guided missiles that would be launched from an armoured container on the left side of the turret.

35mm gun?

Program sources said a 35mm gun was not included as an option, but could be accommodated at any time if this capability was required by Defence. A move to 35mm would involve modification of the weapon itself and its feed mechanism, but no changes to the vehicle. 

The greater length of the 35mm projectile would reduce the ready ammunition load from 200 to approximately 130 rounds, but this would be offset by the greater lethality of the 35mm round.

The Boxer is constructed of rolled hard steel plates topped with composite armour fitted with shockproof mounting bolts.

The electronic components of the turret and communications equipment are protected by a scalable outer shell of armour while crew seats are decoupled from the floor inside an inner citadel, the interior of which is protected from fragments by a spall liner.

Travelling in one of the CRV’s four dismount seats is comfortable and the noise level is surprisingly low, doubtless aided by the three layers of spaced armour below the floor.

As requested by the Commonwealth the Rheinmetall CRV tender included six mandatory variants for Boxer mission modules ranging from Command Post and Cargo/Logistics to Ambulance; the drive module is common to all variants, while the turret is the same in all turreted configurations.

Individual modules, attached to the chassis by just eight bolts and featuring a common wiring loom and standard interfaces, can be changed in a depot in an hour, the company says. In the field with access to a mobile crane, this could extend to four hours.

Stewart confirmed that the Boxer will also be a contender for the Phase 3 Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) element of Land 400, a Request for Information (RfI) for which closed in March. Here the Boxer will compete with the tracked Puma IFV whose interests are being separately advanced by Projekt System Management (PSM); a joint venture between Rheinmetall Defence and Krauss- Maffei Wegmann (KMW).

The Puma will also be proposed with the 30mm turret based on the proven in-service German army configuration, although an upgrade to 35mm will be listed as an option. A live firing demonstration by two Pumas left no one in doubt of their lethality.

The full-length Puma crew cabin contains the driver, gunner and commander and a six-strong infantry squad.

Credit: Rheinmetall

Puma. Credit: Rheinmetall

Although the first production Pumas were delivered to the German Army only last year, Rheinmetall is already analysing the requirements for future fighting vehicles.

Survivability would be required against medium calibre canon ammunition, multiple hits by smaller calibre armour-piercing rounds, and IEDs, Puma program manager Benjamin Brok told a symposium briefing.

Additional protection in the future could be provided by hard kill active defence systems coupled with hit avoidance systems including laser/infra-red and radar threat detection, soft kill systems, jamming, and sniper detection.

Lethality would involve the engagement of multiple targets, penetration at more than 2,500 metres of state-of-the-art armoured vehicles, and intelligent time-fuzed, directable airburst ammunition. High-energy lasers should be available in the future as a secondary armament.

Improved tactical mobility would be provided by hybrid electric propulsion and auxiliary power units would furnish the necessary improvements in efficiency and energy management together with 24-hour silent watch capability.

C4I and ISTAR requirements would include 360-degree situational awareness with automatic target acquisition and automatic tracking across all spectrums, plus digitalised and shared data at platoon level.

Unburdening the crew would require intuitive human/machine interfaces and embedded information from sensors, weapons, communications and the battle management system, together with augmented reality, synoptic views, and look-through armour.

The projected unveiling at the Eurosatory exhibition in mid-June of a new Rheinmetall IFV dubbed the Lynx, no details of which were available in advance, could disclose evolved or new technologies of relevance to Land 400 Phase 3.

Tanks

The first public appearance in 2015 of Russia’s T-14 Armata main battle tank (MBT) and the reported effectiveness of its reactive armour has accelerated development by Rheinmetall of a 130mm smoothbore tank gun which it expects to field in the early 2020s.

Meanwhile the longer barrel on the L/55 development of the company’s L/44 120mm gun, the standard NATO smoothbore gun for Leopard 2 and Abrams M1AI MBTs, has increased the effective kill range of the Leopard 2 from 2.5 to 3.5 km.

This and numerous other upgrades available to the 18 countries operating Leopards - including a whimsical sun umbrella above the commander’s cupola in the same pattern as a new thermal camouflage/cover from Rheinmetall Canada– have been incorporated in a technical demonstrator based on the benchmark Leopard 2 platform that was on display at Unterlüss.

MBT with modern force protection packages. Credit: Rheinmetall

MBT with modern force protection packages. Credit: Rheinmetall

A number of those enhancements have already been selected by Indonesia for 61 Leopard 2 RI (Republic of Indonesia) MBTs ordered from Rheinmetall Defence in December 2012, eight of which have now been delivered.

These form part of a US$280 million contract encompassing the Leopard 2 RIs, 42 Leopard 2+ MBTs - standard Leopard 2 A4 MBTs with the addition of a bustle-mounted air conditioning system - 42 upgraded Marder 1A3 infantry fighting vehicles, and 11 armoured recovery and engineering vehicles from surplus German Army stocks.

All 42 of the Leopard 2+ have now been delivered as have the Marders and support vehicles, Rheinmetall executives said. They declined to disclose the anticipated delivery dates for the balance of the Leopard 2 RIs.

In addition to air conditioning the RI upgrade from the standard Leopard 2 A4 includes the replacement of the electro-hydraulic gun control equipment with an all-electric drive, installation of an auxiliary power unit to provide a silent watch capability, additional composite armour on the turret and hull, and a rear view camera for the driver.

Notably, the 120 mm L/44 smoothbore gun and sighting system has been modified to fire the latest Rheinmetall DM11 programmable high explosive projectile.

This offers three fuze options programmable by the Leopard 2 after the round has been loaded – impact, impact with delay so the warhead explodes after penetration of cover, and air burst.

155mm demo

A live firing demonstration by a PzH 2000 155mm self-propelled howitzer underlined Rheinmetall’s capability with this larger calibre ammunition. Executives confirmed the company would be bidding its Assegai family of 155mm projectiles for Land 17 Phase 1C.2, the RfT for which closed on 2 June.

All 11 Assegai projectile types are supplied with a boat tail assembly that can be replaced in the field with a base bleed unit, adding about 30 per cent to the maximum range. For Army’s M777A 39 calibre towed howitzers this would provide reach of more than 30km.

The explosion of an Assegai 8.8kg PBX warhead produces more than 20,000 fragments not only from the projectile’s casing but also from encapsulated tungsten spheres, creating the same effect over an area the size of a football field as four or five conventional high explosive shells.

Looking into the near future, the company demonstrated a Boxer-mounted High Energy Laser System (HELS) which it says can hit a target only 20mm in diameter at a distance of up to 1,000 metres, and could be in service by 2020.

The Unterlüss firing involved a heavy machinegun manned by a dummy mounted on the tray of a pickup truck about 350 metres from the Boxer. As intended, a two second burst from the 20 kW laser beam-forming unit caused a 12.7mm cartridge in the ammunition belt to deflagrate without the dummy being touched.

Using the vehicle’s standard batteries as its integrated power source, the effector is capable of up to 1,000 ‘firings’ of 2-3 second bursts – equivalent to 30 minutes use – before a recharge is required.

Using a battle management system to enable a number of vehicles to superimpose their beams simultaneously, an 80kW power output can be achieved by firing four 20kW HELS together to achieve a range of more than 3,000 metres.

The laser also neutralised a small drone flying at about 400 feet in a demonstration of its eventual potential within the Skyshield ground-based air defence system, a possible offering by Rheinmetall for Land 19 Phase 7B.

The system comprises a Skyguard 3 fire control unit for target acquisition and weapon control and two 1,000 rounds per minute Oerlikon 35mm revolver guns as effectors.

In recent tests, the standard 35mm cannon has been replaced in the gun turret by a 10kW fibre laser and beam-forming unit, advancing Rheinmetall’s intention for the laser system to be modular and capable of retrofit to any client platform.

A naval version now under development would deploy an 80 kW weapon (created by the superimposition of 4x20 kW lasers) in a single turret to combat targets such as fast attack boats and UAVs.

Disclaimer: Julian Kerr travelled to Unterluess as the guest of Rheinmetall Defence

This article first appeared in the July 2016 edition of ADM.

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