Army awards Georgia Tech $33M to be lead weapons integrator for CAML program

WASHINGTON — The Army has announced it awarded Georgia Tech Research Institute up to $33.4 million to be the lead weapons systems integrator for the service’s Common Autonomous Multidomain Launcher (CAML) prototype program.

“The Army is moving with urgency to deliver adaptable, survivable, and scalable Fires capabilities to Soldiers,” Lt. Gen. Frank Lozano, Portfolio Acquisition Executive (PAE) of Fires, said in a service release late Monday. “CAML gives us a pathway to experiment with modular launcher concepts, learn quickly, and make informed decisions at the speed of relevance.” 

The CAML program is set to serve as a replacement for the Army’s Typhon — its Mid-Range Capability (MRC) long-range launcher — after the service discovered it was too large to operate on the battlefield. The new launcher will be an autonomous, optionally crewed, “highly mobile” cross-domain fires launcher designed to be air transportable. 

As the weapons system integrator, Georgia Tech Research Institute will be responsible for support systems engineering, interface integration, modeling and simulating and other “integrated” testing for the CAML prototype program, the Army said in its release. The period of performance of the award is estimated to be 36 months. 

Rather than choosing a single, “complete system,” the Army is “executing a modular acquisition strategy” where Georgia Tech will lead the integration of the autonomous mobility platform and the modular munitions pallets — the components that make up the system. Per Monday’s release, the Army is set to announce awards for the components in the coming months. 

Monday’s announcement comes after Breaking Defense reported in January that the service had been planning to shake up the way it wanted to procure CAML by awarding a weapons systems integrator and then vendors for the individual components of the system, creating a “teams of teams approach,” Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, said. 

“How do you bring together folks like a weapon system integrator, a munitions palette and an autonomous platform provider, so that we aren’t trying to ask one company who probably isn’t good at those things individually to try to do the things they’re not good at,” Miller told Breaking Defense at the time. “We are really serious about bringing the team together so that it looks and feels like Legos, where the best athlete is doing the thing they’re really good at.”  

Prior to the shake up, the Army was open to selecting separate vendors for a medium CAML variant and a heavy variant, Breaking Defense previously reported. However, as Miller said in January, with the teams of teams approach, it remains unclear how the service could execute such an arrangement.

Further, the Army announced in a notice last week that the service would be holding an industry day on Sept. 2 on the CAML program in an attempt to better define how it plans to acquire the system amid multiple solicitations that have “caused confusion among industry partners.” 

“The Army wishes to level-set expectations on these points and encourage continued industry participation in the program,” the solicitation from Aug. 27 reads.