Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 111

TAILORED SYSTEMS

(Photo courtesy of Textron AirLand, LLC)

A Textron AirLand Armored Scorpion ISR-Strike aircraft flies in November 2014. Conceived as a close air support (CAS) aircraft for a lowthreat air defense environment, the Scorpion was built from off-the-shelf components in twenty-three months, from concept to first flight,
for about $20 million. Its operating cost is about $3,000, compared to about $18,000 for an F-16 performing the same CAS mission.

deploy, the regional actors will already have home-field
advantage, including equipment attuned to the operating environment. For example, the South Korean
K1 tank is similar to the U.S. M1 tank except that it
has a hydropneumatic suspension, which increases
the available gun elevation and depression angles. The
increased angles provide a greater vertical firing range,
an important advantage in Korea’s dense urban areas
and surrounding mountainous terrain. The United
States needs such tailored materiel to attain an affordable capability overmatch of enemy systems by default.
In place of the current one-size-fits-all acquisition
approach, since platforms fight in formations, the tip
of the future spear (see figure 1, page 110) could be
inexpensively “sharpened” by fielding a small quantity
of highly tailored systems that perform a limited mission set extremely well. It is also possible that small
quantities of regionally tailored equipment could be
designed and fielded.
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016

Such a process, capable of rapidly producing tailored and adaptable solutions, would be hard for our
enemies to duplicate since it requires a large organization and capital investment. It would create an
asymmetric advantage for our forces that most of our
adversaries would not be able to counter easily.
Ideally, rapid manufacturing could create a procurement system that produces custom materiel at a cost
low enough to make equipment disposable. Further cost
savings might be realized by upgrading existing Army assets such as high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles
(HMMWV) operating at protection levels unsuitable
for manned missions with autonomy kits that enable the
platform to function robotically without a human operator in the vehicle. Such newly autonomous systems could
perform both mundane and dangerous missions.
A further advantage of tailored systems is that they
will force the enemy to deal with a variety of unknown U.S. assets, perhaps seen for the first time. Since
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