ILDS Cancelled

[GopherGuts]

Did everyone else hear that the ILDS was cancelled in July even after all the new upgrades that were added this year.  Hopefully they will move the everything onto an A3 platform.

 

[McG]

ILDS was actually canceled in late June.

The Protection Vehicle (PV) will not be transferred to a TLAV platform; the project is dead.
The existing PVs, Remote Detection Vehicles and Control Vehicles will be given to the DRDCs or disposed of.

Despite the fact that the PV did have some operational success in Afghanistan, the whole system was still sucking millions for development, was under-achieving, and was in competition for manpower with the RCP/EROC.

 

[043]

Quite frankly.....ILDS, while a good idea, was in fact a POS.

 

[GopherGuts]

I was told that they had a few problems with the RDV and it being too complicated to use or something but it was designed for tours like Bosnia but Afganistan is a whole new type of threat.  But dont you think that using a remote vehicle like the PV to clear a route is a lot safer than the Huskey?

 

[McG]

... dont you think that using a remote vehicle like the PV to clear a route is a lot safer than the Huskey?

That is where the limited operational success was.  However, the system was not designed to operate as a route breaching capability.  Forcing it into this role adds new logistic problems, and engineering deficiencies in the design become more pronounced challenges then when operating in the relatively static role of area clearance operations.

I should be noted that the PV is not (and never was) a clearance vehicle; it is a threat reduction vehicle.  It was a sacrificial robot intended to trundle along in front and detonate anything that could also be detonated by the RDV.

Ideally, we would have something fully robotic with greater detection capabilities than envisioned for the ILDS, and also the ability to accelerate up to convoy speeds (while obviously accepting some degradation of detection capability).

With ILDS, we are still $ millions away.  While EROC is not robotic, it is succeeding in the job now and upgrades are still coming.