Army, industry vehicle teams embrace off-the-shelf solutions, but not always

GVSETS 2025 — As the Army races to embrace commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions, officials and industry figures here said they’re seeing challenges both in how the acquisition process is done and, ultimately, the limits to what COTS products can bring to bear when it comes to ground vehicles.

“It confronts both the way we do business as well as the way we acquire systems or features for those systems,” Tom Vern an official with the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center, said on a panel at 17th Annual Ground Vehicle Systems Engineering & Technology Symposium.

For one, many military vehicles are not designed with COTS systems in mind, making their use and incremental improvement more difficult. That, one industry figure said, highlights the need for the Pentagon to emphasize more flexible open architectures.

Fellow panelist Mike Milner, Vice President of Business Development and Strategy at American Rheinmetall Vehicles, said that “integrating costs into legacy products without an open architecture will be very difficult without some sort of application.”

“Setting that architecture is probably one of the most paramount things for the government,” he said.

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The need to deploy ground platforms in challenging environments also hampers the use of commercial parts, which are not rugged enough to properly work in extreme temperatures or in icy, sandy and humid scenarios.

During a panel, Chris Orlowski, Anduril’s Associate Director of Land Systems, said the military needs to pick its spots for COTS integration. “We don’t use a tank for everything, and we shouldn’t use a COTS product for everything.”

Pete Johnson, VP of Business Development for Integrated Vehicles at GM Defense, agreed.

“I think our key role in industry, in this space, is one: we have to be mindful of what our capabilities are and, obviously, make sure we understand what the warfighters are and their objectives,” he said.

Increasing the adoption of commercial solutions also requires providing operators with clear and easy-to-understand information about the capability and its uses.

From Orlowski’s perspective, “You have to make sure that the brief tells the soldiers, ‘This is what it can do.’ ‘This is where you probably shouldn’t use it.’ Because when those things don’t happen, the process of adoption becomes a challenge either through omission or deception or just not understanding”.

For that matter, increasing opportunities for gathering users’ guidance and recommendations will be crucial to both defining procurement requirements and increasing the use of cutting-edge solutions.

Tim George, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, ND Defense LLC, remarked on the stage that “soldier feedback is even more critical” regarding the use of COTS. “It needs to be an ongoing process. We need to continue to have those touch points, probably before we develop something.”

In this scenario, Vern stated that the US Army has been working “through a number of changes, trying to move faster to adopt COTS, trying to shift standards and publication standards.”

In the meantime, industry is aiming to up its game too.

“We have to be faster and absolutely have to be more collaborative,” George added. “There are plenty of small, innovative companies that I think we should be working with, bringing them up to like working in defense.”