Army to Test New Modular Turret on Stryker - Defensetech

The U.S. Army plans to test a new modular turret on a Stryker armored vehicle in coming months, company officials said.

CMI Defence, a turret-maker based in Belgium, and Raytheon Co., the missile-maker based in Waltham, Massachusetts, announced they received cooperative research and development agreements from the service’s Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center to evaluate the technology.

Specifically, the arrangements call for evaluating CMI’s new Cockerill 3030 turret with interchangeable guns and Raytheon’s sensor called the Commander Independent Viewer, or CIV, next year on a Stryker, officials said. The products were displayed for the first time this week at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C.

The roughly five-ton turret can be manned or unmanned and is capable of accepting any number of guns, including a 30mm or 105mm cannon or a missile launcher, according to Bo Arne Berglund, chief marketing officer for CMI. “The only thing you need to change is the cannon and possibly the auto-loaders and ammunition systems,” he said.

CMI this year is starting to deliver the product to an unnamed customer in the Middle East, Berglund said.

The company plans to wrap up a design review for the U.S. Army this month, deliver a turret with a 30mm gun made by Orbital ATK Inc. in April and conduct a test-firing sometime next summer, possibly at Fort Benning in Georgia, Berglund said.

Lorenzo Cortes, a spokesman for Raytheon, said the service “will use that combined sensor-turret combo to evaluate what kind of lethality they can get if they wanted to upgrade their Stryker fleet and other vehicles.”

General Dynamics Corp. last year teamed with Kongsberg, based in Norway, to upgrade a portion of the Stryker fleet with the Protector medium-caliber remote weapon station, or MCRWS, under a contract with the Army.

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