Engineering Safety for Our Troops 
by Andrew Kerr
July 2007

One of the sadder recurring stories coming out of Iraq is that of troop injuries and fatalities caused by roadside bombs, often referred to as "improvised explosion devices" (IEPs), detonating under trucks. Since 2005 these have been the leading cause of death for American troops in Iraq.

Clearly this is a problem that demands solutions, so Georgia Tech's Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) went about finding some. The result was the development of the ULTRA "concept vehicle", a sort of super truck designed to better withstand IEPs and more traditional ballistics.

In June I spoke with GTRI's Gary Caille about the ULTRA. Gary is a retired submarine officer who understands first-hand the realities of the battlefield today.

Q - How did you get involved in this program?

A - Naval Rear Admiral Jake Cohen, currently undersecretary for science and tech at Homeland Security, asked us to look at coming up with the concept of putting a megawatt of power on the battlefield in a Humvee-like package.

Scott Badenoch at the time was the technical lead, and his background was automotive. He lived in the Detroit area and he ran the Detroit office for GTRI at the time.

My background is acoustics and submarines, and running programs, systems engineering and program management.

Q - Were you military?

A - I just retired after 30 years from the Navy, 1 June, Navy Reserve. I got over 14 years active duty and the rest in the Navy Reserve.

Q - Were you deployed in any hot zones?

A - I was an engineering duty officer and a submarine officer. As a submarine officer we were always in a hot zone.

Q - So you definitely understand first-hand the needs of the armed forces.

A - I've been in the program management technical director role for major programs so I understand how that all works together.

Q - Is the general idea behind a "concept vehicle" to demonstrate the ultimate possibility of what something might be?

A - It's an idea. Many concept vehicles are rolled out at shows and stuff like that. Some of those never go to production, they never go a step further because, OK, it's a nice concept, but it doesn't meet the market practicalities.

Q - In the original press release regarding the ULTRA that I read online, much was made of stock car features being utilized.

A - We tried to get some of those ideas in there as far as some of the harnasses and stuff like that. We had talked to folks involved in that line of work, but because we didn't focus on vehicle engineering as much, a lot of that stuff was not put in. If the program had continued some of that stuff could have been put in--the tear-away things and stuff like that.

Q - Were the stock car features proposed specifically to address rollovers?

A - It's more how do you dissipate energy in either a collusion or explosion. Most of your race cars when they hit the wall, a lot of the stuff goes flying away. The question is, can you do the same thing in the event of either a collision or an explosion? The answer is you probably could.

Remember, concept vehicles don't always necessarily work, and unless you develop the concept, employ it, and test it fully, there's a lot of great concepts that never make it because frankly they're not practical, or they cost too much, or they compromise something else.

Q - How do you dissipate energy in a heavy, armored vehicle? Seems armor is very unyielding.

A - You still need to protect the people from ballistics or projectiles, whether it be shrapnel generated by an explosion or bullets, so in all armors that I'm aware of they have this rigidity factor. What you want is your armor around the people to be able to absorb the blast or to divert the blast. Where the energy dissipation was thought about coming in was if you have a mine that goes off underneath the front wheel, instead of lifting the whole body you could have portions of the front blow off to dissipate the energy.

Q - Would those portions exist solely to absorb energy under those circumstances?

A - Unknown. Part of that comes back to: what's the size of your blast? Of course if it's a small anti-personnel mine, the hope is that you could have at least some driveability or limited driveability or something along that line. If it's one of the IED's that we're seeing or some of the larger mines, the whole focus is survival, not necessarily surivivability of the vehicle, but survivability of the people. That represents a fairly fundamental concept change in the way we build military vehicles. The Cold War idea was to protect the vehicle, cause you only had a limited number of them and the vehicle needed to survive. But that concept has changed today. Today it's all about the people inside.

Q - A radar system was described in the article. Describe to me how the radar system would be used.

A - What that was referring to was something called active cruise control. You actually see it in Volvos and Infinities today. If you think about it, you're driving on a highway and you have one of these cars with this in it, if they sense the car in front of them is slowing down or they're going to need avoid a collision, they'll immediately react. Military vehicles today do not have anything like that at all.

It's particularly important if you think about people running in a convoy, because you're moving as fast as you can probably move, you have limited visibility because you have limited lighting, and sometimes in the desert it's very dusty, so your visibility is limited, and because of the threats out there you're going as fast as you can, and people are quite honestly very tired. This is not an 8 hour per day job where you get your 8 hours and get 16 down, something like that. Whoever's in a convoy these days, they're quite honestly in a limited sleep condition, so something like this where you could possibly avoid a chain reaction type of thing, where you can help maintain the distances between vehicles, would be very useful. These are big trucks, so they don't stop on a dime. They don't have anti-lock breaking. It's like a series of 18 wheelers driving on a road with limited lights on, and somebody stops in the front and by the time it propagates through...

If you go back and look at what was killing people during the initial portions of the war, over 40% of the deaths were the results of traffic accidents.

Q - The spherical compartment reminds me of a bathysphere. Were bathyspheres a source of inspiration for the design of that?

A - No. The spherical shape is designed for two things. One is maximized volume for surface area, and again from a strength perspective, which does go back to your bathysphere argument a little bit, eggs are pretty strong objects. Spheres are very strong. That's why the original bathyspheres were built that way; they were spheroidal and pressure pushes all around evenly, so you get even compression, which just doesn't create stresses or unusual stresses throughout. So, in a similar way we probably took advantage of the fact that a spheroidal shape has strength advantages over non-spheroidal shapes. But we didn't think about the bathysphere specifically.

Q - What are the differences between today's military vehicles and the ULTRA that could theoretically replace them?

A - If you go back to the Humvee, all they've done is add armor protection on the sides and some on the bottom. Because it's an existing vehicle, it's kind of like modifying your house, the house structure's still there, what can you do? There's not much you can change.

Q - So basically you're just hanging or attaching plates on the surfaces.

A - Yep. Whereas what you're seeing now in some of what's called the MRV, mine-resistant vehicles, that are out there, and in potentially the next generation of vehicle, which is the joint light tactical vehicle, is you'll see vehicles specifically designed with survivability in mind.

It's real easy to throw stones at the Humvee, but let's put it in perspective. Submarines don't fly very well because they're not designed to. The same applies to the Humvee. The Humvee does everything it was supposed to do and designed to do and it does those things well with the technology that was around when it was designed. The game changed, we modified the Humvee, we made quick adaptations and changes to it, and now we're complaining that it's not meeting the peak performance. But the Humvee does everything that it was designed to do with the technology available at the time. It was not asked to do this mission. It was a utility vehicle.

Q - Was this due to a change in overall tactics of war or specifically to the environment of places like Iraq or Afghanistan?

A - Where we first saw this was in Mogadishu [Somalia] and places like that, where we took, in that particular case, soldiers into a hostile situation in those vehicles. Everybody's read Black Hawk Down or seen the movie. But I think it's a change in tech--it's a change in both. We've changed where we're fighting and it's a tactical issue, a method of fighting.

Q - Did you test the vehicle's ability to withstand blasts with actual people inside?

A - [Laughing.] No. There's laws about that. And there's also lawyers.

We're under contract right now to develop a better crew compartment and to test it against blasts. You instrument the insides and then you apply the instrumentation to special dummies that function or behave like humans, the same dummies you see in car crash tests and stuff like that.

Q- Very "Mythbusters."

A - Yeah. No, we don't put people in a test vehicle. Our lawyers would have a field day.

Q - How about hiring a stuntman from Hollywood?

A - [Laughing.] The other question is that there can always be an overmatching event--a bigger explosion. We can always create bigger and different types of explosions. That's our problem right now in Iraq. The insurgents are adapting on a very short time frame to our tactics. We change, they change. They change this way, we change our tactics to accommodate that, they change something different. That's the whole basis of war.

Q - It's just like in nature, evolution.

A - Yep. Adapting things, adapting technologies and weapons.

Q - Sort of like the increasingly obsolete Humvee situation you described.

A - Things changed. If ten pounds of explosives is what you're designed for and what everybody's been using, and somebody decides to put two of them together, suddenly you have 20 pounds. You've probably seen the video where an M1 Abrams Tank drives over a drainage ditch and it blows up and the turret goes off. There's no way a light tactical vehicle, regardless of its armor situation, could survive that, because the tank is the most heavily armored vehicle we have. So you can always create an overmatching event.

A - Remember these overmatching events are really just through adding more and more explosive. The other thing that's happening...You're seeing recently the discussion on the MRAPs [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles] where they're not sufficient for explosively formed projectiles, EFPs. That technology has been around for several hundred years.

Q - Seems that things like this can be anticipated, if it's just a matter of insurgents adding more explosives.

A - Where things are progressing today is towards this thing called an A/B kit. The base vehicle, the A kit, has a certain level of protection against what I'll call standard small arms fire, and limited blast protection. You go in theater and all of a sudden the particular theater that we're in, the threat is larger. So you take this B kit and add it to the A kit and now you've improved your survivability, so now, instead of just standard small arms, maybe you can take armor piercing projectiles. This is how you get to your question about how do I develop a vehicle that can meet new threats as they evolve. That's how you do it--you create these A/B additional add-on kits. Now the important thing here is that when you design the vehicle the chasse, you have to make sure the chasse is capable of performing both from a stability perspective, mobility perspective, the additional weight, because all these armors are going to add weight.

Q - Once, wars were waged country versus country, where the highest technology of one side was pitted against the highest technology of the other. Today's wars are very different.

A - One of the things that has greatly aided the insurgents is the internet. Information transmission, the speed at which it is transmitted, and the ease that it can be shared today has significantly changed the way things are being done by the insurgents, because they can respond very quickly, they can share information very quickly. If you went back 30 years ago, a situation that occurred 200 miles away would take a finite amount of time for people to understand what happened. Today it's instantaneous.

Q - Interesting how information-sharing alone has leveled the playing field to the degree it has.

A - It's certainly changed the game. These may be insurgents in third world countries, but don't underestimate them. They have proven they are very capable.

Q - How many years went into creating the ULTRA vehicle?

A - One year. That was one of the things the Admiral wanted to do, he wanted to show you could do something quickly. The problem is that the average acquisition program in the government is a 12 to 15 year process. We have to do things faster.

Q - How did you get the ULTRA out so quickly?

A - We went to a COTS solution, COTS being "Commercial Off The Shelf," with the vehicle. But there's been other programs that have been demonstrated that you can do that as quickly with much more model-based simulation.

Q - Computer modeling?

A - Yes. We didn't do much on ULTRA because we weren't dealing with the vehicle itself. We did modeling and simulation on the armor, and certainly as far as modeling about how it would behave under rollover conditions, how the blast, how the crew compartment would behave under blasts, and rollover type things with stress and things like that we did. But in today's world there are a couple of programs that have recently been done called advanced concept technology demonstrators, ACTD's, where they took a vehicle, did a modeling simulation study of the entire vehicle, and then built the vehicle, and the vehicle turned out and ran--was functional and met those specifications. It's the same thing you're seeing today in airplane design, where we're doing a drawing, going right to the machining, and then we're building it. So, vehicles are now moving into this modeling and simulation-based design directly into a prototype.

In the past they'd build something, you'd build it again. We don't have the time for that today. And the modeling and simulation tools are getting better. Just look at your computer. Where was your computer system 10 years ago? You were at a 486 machine ten years ago, 12 years ago. What I used to tell people is that when the present class of Virginia-class submarines was designed in 1992, 1993, the computer system was a 486 or 386 machine. When the first ship got wet two years ago, where was our computer technology? We're in gigahertzy stuff. It had really leaped forward.

Q - Where do things go wrong in modeling? I always think of Isaac Newton's elegant laws of physics--

A - They haven't changed.

Q - So why aren't computer models perfect today?

A - It becomes a size issue, and then the time to run it, a detail issue, and then did you make all the right assumptions? Does the model represent the physics? The physics is there, that's Newton's laws. Question is, does your model accurately represent the physics and does the properties that you put in, are they correct? Because garbage in, garbage out. And then it just comes down to a fidelity issue. Do you have enough detail to represent what you need to represent? Case in point, if I'm going to do a model of your house I need to put every light switch in the model.

Q - Will the ULTRA vehicle ever be "done," or is the nature of concept vehicles that they never are finished?

A - What is happening now is both the marine corps and the army is moving towards a new vehicle program that would serve to fill the mission role that this concept was going to look into. It's called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, JLTV, and last I heard is the program, which is a joint marine corp/army program, was going through a request for proposal over the next month or so, over the next couple of months, and move forward towards building a family of five vehicles that would meet these requirements.

Q - Are you in competition with other groups for that?

A - That competition will be between what I'll call the OEMs, Original Equipment Manufacturers, and it will involve in my estimate the large manufacturers, the General Dynamics, the VAE's, the Oshkoshes, the AM Generals, Lockhead Martin...So it will be the very large system engineering, vehicle manufacturers. If we do anything it will be in a consulting role, because we can't produce--and this is to go to production.

Q - When would this family of five vehicles roll out?

A - Sometime after the 2010, 2012 timeframe they envision having the first production line vehicles roll out.