Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - October 2022 - 34

ALLISON
Q&A
Allison's new eGen Force electrified
transmission features a 220-kW electric
motor and associated inverter for onboard
vehicle power and parallel hybrid-electric
operation for defense applications.
in people - it's people who are needed to do this. Right now,
there's a slight crisis as far as being able to recruit the people
that are necessary to be able to man these kinds of systems.
Will alternative fuels and biofuels have a greater role in defense
applications?
The answer is yes, ideally in the future. Fuel-cell technology
can certainly help - anything that can lighten the logistical
load. For the U.S. military, its expeditionary force must move
to different places around the world. If you can lessen the
load on a logistical tail, that will make a difference.
How do you view connected and autonomous vehicles in
defense, in automated platoons?
Autonomous is the idea behind it. And it could be remotely
piloted - I've seen it from the aerial side. When we were
striking targets all over Iraq and Syria, I was talking to drone
pilots that were in Nevada. At first, early on in 2014, the drone
pilots could fly very well, but they couldn't hit a whole lot -
they had to work on their targeting. The technology and the
training have increased. The idea of using unmanned systems,
remotely piloted, can work. On the ground, a platoon of four
tanks, for example, could in fact move together and maybe
only one is manned and the others could be piloted remotely,
or one day we could have the autonomy that we really want,
using artificial intelligence. That's a leap right now, but at least
remotely piloted - that's the whole idea behind the Army's
new Optionally Manned Fighting Vehicle.
How does the process for defense differ from advancing
commercial technology?
What we're seeing is, and I'll use the OMFV as an example,
there is a desire by the Department of Defense to really do it.
34 October 2022
You have to put money behind it, or it won't happen in the
defense space. Allison's been involved in the EV space now
for nearly 20 years; we wanted to see the U.S. military move
in that direction for years with trucks. But because it wasn't
commercial and because there wasn't an overall desire - and
desire is always equated to budgets and putting money behind
it - OEMs said, 'No thank you, not interested.' It is a different
process on the defense side, it's based on threats. If
other countries see a threat, boom, they'll jump on EV. But the
U.S. is probably the leader in EV right now, along with Israel
and a couple other nations.
Which is more important, making current technology more
efficient, or future technology innovation?
That's a balance, you've got to do both. We can never forget
about our own modernization, but at the same time, it's also
modifying current systems that we have. If we do nothing but
look at future technology, then right in the present, you have
something like Russia invading Ukraine, and we may find ourselves
in a war with what we have. So there's got to be a balance
of improving our current systems and then looking farther
out in the future. And you see the budgets reflect that, at
least for the defense.
What will be the basis for way-finding for autonomous offroad
vehicles?
Well, that was my challenge to you [the engineers in attendance].
That's the difficulty of it. Is it completely GPS driven?
But we've got to be careful because we have competitors
who can have anti-satellite technology and take out the
GPSs. So how do you do that? I don't have an answer; I
throw that to you, our engineers of the world, to figure that
one out.
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Truck & Off-Highway Engineering - October 2022

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