While the shadow of uncertainty has been cast on a promising vehicle survivability technology known as the "structural blast chimney" due to the cancellation of the Army's competitive humvee recapitalization program, it may be revived for the upcoming Joint Light Tactical Vehicle competition, Inside the Army has learned from sources and officials.
The novel chimney solution generated substantial buzz when its was secretly demonstrated for a group of VIPs at an Association of the United States Army conference in October 2010. The fact that the demonstration was followed by many months of silence from the chimney's developers only added to the technology's mystique. Army and Marine Corps leaders have been questioned about it on Capitol Hill, it has been the subject of newspaper editorials pushing for its adoption, and it has been featured in the The New York Times/.../
Eric Lindsey, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, who recently co-wrote a report on the future of Army vehicles, thinks the chimney has gone the way of other promising defense technologies that could not cross the bridge between idea and reality.
"That has really dropped off the radar. . . . I think the blast chimney probably died with the MECV program," he wrote in a Feb. 29 email, noting that it was likely to be put "in a big drawer somewhere to await the day when it looks like JLTV isn't going to make it and people start thinking about alternatives."
For example, Lindsey wrote, "a decade ago people were talking about re-engineering the Abrams to be more fuel efficient, but the Army said, 'nah, it wouldn't be worth it' because of plans to create the Future Combat Systems family of vehicles. FCS has since been terminated and flash forward to 2012 and I get a brief . . . saying, 'hey, so we can still do this, and now it looks like Abrams will be in service until the 2040s.' My point being that these are cards they can hold onto for a long time, and play whenever the opportunity seems right."
Lindsey stressed that adding the chimney to existing humvees was no small task. "Having crawled around inside and underneath the thing, I can tell you that the addition of the blast chimney is a major structural change and not the kind of feature that can simply be incorporated into existing humvees as they're reset at depots," he wrote. "It's not a matter of just cutting two holes and adding something in between."