Kongsberg Defense to provide wireless fire control for RCV

The Army has chosen Kongsberg Defense and Aerospace to provide a wireless fire control capability to support the Light and Medium variants of the future Robotic Combat Vehicle, the company announced today.

"This decision creates a common architecture across all current robotic lethality fire control for crew-served, medium caliber and anti-tank weapons," Kongsberg said in a press release.

The company demonstrated its capability in June 2019 by firing a Javelin anti-tank guided missile and 12.7 mm machine gun from a legacy Common Remotely Operated Weapon Station M153 mounted on an unmanned ground vehicle at Redstone Test Center in Alabama, according to the release.

The company also demonstrated "secure transmissions of video and fire-control data including command signals over radio from the weapon station and the missile."

Another government-sponsored test of the medium caliber wireless capability will take place later this year.

"This latest contract for wireless fire-control architecture augments previous awards to Kongsberg for the wireless fire-control architecture for the U.S. Army RCV-L program and the Multi-User, Multi-Station (MUMS) distributed fire-control architecture," the release states. "The MUMS architecture was developed against a U.S. Marine Corps requirement for 'one over many, many over one' control of RWS. The MUMS architecture is currently being applied to all Marine RWS deliveries including systems for the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV)."

Additionally, Kongsberg's CROWS-J and MCT-30 remotely operated turret have been selected as government-furnished equipment for the Army's Phase 2 experimentation for the RCV.