Systems engineering approach to ground combat vehicle survivability in urban operations

Abstract

Ground combat vehicles (GCV) traditionally rely on passive armor to reduce their vulnerability against threats. This is insufficient now, given the increasing gap between threat lethality and passive armor capability and the change in threat scenario from relatively open terrain to urban terrain. This thesis provides an overview of system survivability and discusses the conventional approach to GCV survivability. This thesis then uses a systems engineering approach to guide the subsequent study, which identifies likely threats to GCVs in an urban environment and discusses potential susceptibility reduction techniques and technologies that can counter the threats. This thesis then develops a survivability assessment model (using Imagine That's ExtendSim), which quantifies the different survivability characteristics of a GCV and determines the sets of survivability characteristics to meet the defined survivability requirement. Finally, this thesis demonstrates the use of a decision-making methodology (multi-attribute decision-making) to manage the capability conflicts that arise between survivability and other key platform capabilities. Therefore, this author hopes to help military planners and engineers design more robust, holistic and balanced survivability solutions for GCVs, to provide more flexibility against different types of threats and threat scenarios.