Accelerate Delivery
Mission: Accelerate Delivery of Bradley Fighting Vehicles
Principal Obstacle:
Calibration bottleneck
Solution:
Look through the other end of the scope
The Imperative:
The Bradley Fighting Vehicle is an essential tool for America’s ground troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Designed to transport infantry, the Bradley offers armored protection, covering fire for dismounted troops, and weaponry to suppress enemy tanks and armored vehicles. The Bradley can accommodate nine: a crew of three (commander, gunner, driver) plus six fully-geared soldiers.
BAE Systems of York, Pennsylvania won a contract for more than $1 billion from the U.S. Army’s TACOM Life Cycle Management Command for refurbishing 1,042 Bradley Fighting Vehicles that have served in the harshest combat conditions. Vehicles undergo a full refit. It is vital to the mission to return these highly survivable mobile and lethal Bradley systems back to our troops as soon as possible, in battle-ready condition.
BAE is a leading defense contractor that has developed a rapid, efficient process to refurbish used Bradleys so they can be returned to service with minimum downtime.
Except for one stubborn bottleneck.
Aligning the gun sight with the Bradley’s main weapon, the M242 25 mm chain gun, was so time-consuming it was slowing deliveries. BAE employed a technique that has been in continuous use since World War Two and works fine, except that for BAE’s purposes it was proving to be so cumbersome that a fix was needed.
The system features two arc-shaped towers, each about 40 feet tall, fitted with an array of collimators (concave mirrors). A telescope is aimed at the collimators from inside the tank through the barrel and simultaneously from the mounting platform for the sighting unit on top. Optical collimators are also used to calibrate binoculars, another device where two sightlines must meet.
The process of calibrating the Bradley weapons platform required removing the turret and adjusting the pitch and yaw of the fire control mounting plate until it aligned with the main gun’s optical system. A series of six collimators are used to test different angles of attack. Rick Marron, Warren-Knight’s Special Product Sales Manager, explains, “It has a collection of motor drives that allow you to tilt the angle as necessary so that it precisely matches the pitch, roll, and yaw of the movement of the gun.”
BAE’s dilemma was that it could refit the vehicles faster than it could calibrate the weapons system, the final step before the Bradleys rolled off the reassembly line. The company had only two gun alignment stations, causing a chokepoint. The obvious fix, to purchase more collimator towers, was also the most expensive—millions just for equipment.
The engineers at BAE explored using a Swiss-made angle sensor to align the sight plate. It was a step in the right direction, but the angle sensor could not detect yaw in the sight mounting plate. The Swiss company’s rep told BAE, “We can’t solve the problems, but we know someone who can: Warren Industries.”
Warren developed a three part approach:
1. Prepare a white paper exploring the engineering of the technology.
2. Prepare a report on the recommended technology for a prototype concept, called a protocept.
3. Build a working prototype.
“We started out with a concept to strike a laser beam to the collimator towers,” says Warren Sales Manager Marron. “But crunching the numbers revealed too many flaws and inaccuracies.”
The Solution:
Company President John Henry Warren, the third generation of Warrens to run the company, explains the firm’s philosophy that, “Creative problem solving begins with looking at every possible way of doing something. The most apt metaphor is that there are many ways to change a tire. You can use a jack or a lift. You can jack up the back of the car. You can jack up the front and maybe the back wheel will come off the ground. You can take the wheel off with a torch. You could flip the car over.”
“In this case, we asked ourselves, ‘Instead of aligning the plate from outside the vehicle, could we do it from inside?”
Warren climbed into one of the Bradleys at the plant, looked around, and had an epiphany—the gun mounting plate on the outside had a connecting rod that entered the interior vehicle through the roof. It was possible to measure the angle of the mounting plate from inside, as well as the angle of the gun barrel. Details are classified, but the system Warren Industries came up with employs mirrors plus a camera, telescope, and electronic angle sensor.
“In a sense this was a low-tech process,” says Warren. “All it required was a set of eyeballs and a willingness to look through what was thought to be the wrong end of the telescope. We weren’t called in the reinvent the process of calibrating the Bradley, but that’s what we ended up doing.”
The solution yielded unexpected benefits. In addition to speeding up delivery times and making it the calibration process less clumsy and costly, the system Warren developed proved to be so portable it facilitated calibration in the field.
The Debrief:
“Many engineers will look at a problem and say, ‘That’s the only way you can do it.’,” says Warren. “People get married to their ideas. Sometimes you need a fresh set of eyes and ears to come in, and instead of talking, listen, and instead of assuming, observe.”