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	Director, Operational Test & Evaluation
FY97 Annual Report

NUCLEAR, BIOLOGICAL, AND CHEMICAL RECONNAISSANCE SYSTEM (NBCRS), M93A1

	Army ACAT III Program 95 systems Total program cost (TY$) $226M Average unit cost (TY$) $2M Full-rate Production 4QFY96 Prime Contractor General Dynamics Land Systems Thyssen Henschel (Germany)

SYSTEM DESCRIPTION & CONTRIBUTION TO JOINT VISION 2010

The M93A1 NBCRS is intended to improve the survivability and mobility of the Army ground forces by providing increased situational awareness and information superiority to headquarters and combat maneuver elements. With the ability to provide rapid, accurate chemical and radiological contamination information to these elements, the NBCRS vehicle forms a key portion of the full-dimensional protection concept.

The mission of the lightly-armored, wheeled NBCRS is to detect, identify, mark, sample, and report chemical and radiological contamination on the battlefield. The three-man NBCRS crew accomplishes these missions by using a sophisticated suite of nuclear and chemical alarms and detectors that have been integrated within the vehicle chassis. The on-board M21 Remote Sensing Chemical Agent Alarm allows the crew to detect chemical agent clouds as far as 5 kilometers away. The crew can perform chemical and radiological reconnaissance operations while operating in a shirt-sleeve environment inside the NBCRS vehicle, even while the vehicle is operating in a contaminated area. During normal vehicle operations, there is no need for the crew to wear chemical protective gear or masks.

Because of the perceived need to quickly field a chemical reconnaissance vehicle to U.S. forces in Europe in the late 1980s, the NBCRS Non-Developmental Item (NDI) program consists of three acquisition phases: (1) Interim System Production (ISP) phase, which provided 48 urgently-needed German-produced vehicles (designated the XM93) that met many of the American requirements. As part of this phase, the German Government donated an additional 60 Americanized German XM93 vehicles to the U.S. Government in support of Operation Desert Storm; (2) System Improvement Phase (SIP), which provided vehicles (designated the XM93E1) that satisfied all American Requirements of Operational Capability; and (3) Block I modification phase, to upgrade all XM93 vehicles to the M93A1 configuration.

The XM93E1 NBCRS IOT&E was conducted from March-May 1994 at Fort Bliss Texas. DOT&E determined that, combined with chemical warfare agent test results from Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, the test was adequate, but the XM93E1 was neither operationally effective, nor operationally suitable. That assessment was based on the system demonstrating chemical warfare agent detection capabilities well below the requirement, the need for an excessive amount of maintenance, and low reliability. Crew performance indicated inadequate training and/or overly complex tasks.

The NBCRS TEMP was approved by the Director in December 1996. This TEMP includes plans for an operational limited user test (LUT) to be conducted in May 1998 as a part of Production Verification Testing (PVT) at Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona. The LUT will consist of two M93A1 configured NBCRS vehicles each completing two 96-hour scenarios at wartime operational tempo.

The XM93E1 NBCRS vehicle assessment of the 1994 IOT&E results was that the system was neither operationally effective nor suitable as indicated above. The Program Manager has applied numerous modifications to the XM93E1 NBCRS vehicle to deal with performance, maintainability, and reliability problems observed in previous testing, and has worked with the U.S. Army Chemical School to improve troop training on the vehicle. The upcoming LUT will provide the PM with the opportunity to demonstrate that these problems have been fixed, and that the vehicle is operationally effective and suitable.