Italy’s Soldato Futuro Picks Up Pace

Preparations for Afghanistan and continued testing dominate past months

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Following the stress test conducted at Cesano last February, at the Army Infantry School, Italy’s Soldato Futuro should soon start platoon level user trials using the 30 kits that have already been manufactured. In the meantime, the Freccia 8x8 infantry fighting vehicle is entering service with the 82nd Infantry Regiment which will soon deploy to Afghanistan. This is also pushing forward the start of battlefield digitization in the Italian Army.

The Italian Army is acquiring a first batch of 800 Beretta ARX160 rifles that will be issued to units being deployed downrange. Many units will therefore get the new rifle before the whole Soldato Futuro suite © P. Valpolini

	The Selex Communications IPR radio. In the future the Soldato Futuro will adopt a wide-band SDR hand-held radio © P. Valpolini

Led by Selex Communications, the team of companies involved includes Larimart, part of Selex Comms itself, Selex Galileo, Beretta and AeroSekur. Soldato Futuro can be split into several different parts, which have progressed at a different pace. Definitely the most advanced element is the weapon; the Beretta ARX160 assault rifles, which has successfully passed the NATO qualification process. A number of rifles have now been tested in Afghanistan for two months by the Folgore Parachute Brigade; feedback being mostly linked to ergonomic details, a shorter butt being one of the requests, as nowadays all soldiers in action wear a ballistic protection and the original length was excessive for those who had shorter arms. The weapon also showed wear on some plastic components, these being now produced with a new and harder composite material. The new rifle has also been distributed in smaller numbers to the 82nd Infantry Regiment, which will field it downrange within the 1st Company which is due to be deployed in early summer as part of the Italian reinforcements to Afghanistan. During firing training sessions, the weapon proved to be very soldier friendly, and precision was statistically 40 percent better than those obtained by the same soldiers with the Beretta 70/90, using in both cases, only iron sights. The 82nd Infantry Regiment soldiers will deploy with the ARX160 equipped with an Aimpoint CompM2 sight. As for the GLX160, not only a portion of the ARX160s are equipped with the grenade launcher. A first batch of those systems has also been acquired by the Italian Army and this is now standard issue, fixed to the Beretta 70/90 thanks to a purpose made interface device. The Army intends to proceed to the acquisition of the rifle and grenade launcher independently of the actual Soldato Futuro programme, and a first batch of 800 rifles and 200 grenade launchers have already been ordered from Beretta, to be distributed to units that will be deployed downrange.

Larimart’s wearable PC is being improved; the ADI E-vest has all the equipment in side pockets to allow crewmembers to sit comfortably in the vehicles, a similar layout also being underway for the infantry © P. Valpolini

Following some initial problems, the C4I components are undergoing acceptance tests and results seem to be encouraging; improvements were made both in the communications field as well as in the computing one. Numerous tests to verify possible interferences with other emitting devices on board the vehicles were carried out and problems linked to communications, the current element being the Individual Pocket Radio, were solved prior to the last tests at Cesano. Further refinements are on the way in the software following those tests. In this field, numerous upgrades will be carried out in the future. In June, Selex Communications will hand over to the Army a small batch of hand-held Software Defined Radios (SDR) for initial testing. These wide band VHF/UHF systems will not be adopted on the pre-production batch of 30 plus 62 kits, but will quite certainly be part of the first contract. The new radio will allow to get rid of the current node as its tasks will be absorbed by the new radio, while on the Freccia this will allow to take out two devices, the 2.4 GHz WiFi radio and the 900 MHz VISSR (Vehicular Integrated Soldier System Radio), which currently provide the link between the dismounted soldier and the vehicle. The adoption of the SDR hand-held radio might also have an impact on the configuration of the 71 Freccia IFVs that will follow the batch of 54 currently being delivered. The C4I will evolve considerably; in the short term the handling capacity will be improved, as well as the graphic interface which will accept VGA signals. The four inch screen used as standard interface will be equipped with a digital compass allowing the soldier to observe the map always oriented to the north. The DDA, the PTT device that connects all audio equipment and is worn on the chest, will be equipped with a mini-joystick. Some minor upgrades in terms of services have already been adopted on the Larimart Wearable Personal Computer, an increase in the computing power being considered in the mid term with the adoption of new CPUs. As for the energy section, also the responsibility of Larimart, the current system provides an energy density of 125 W/kg and is based on two hot swappable batteries with the system allowing graceful degradation, when energy reaches low levels. Larimart aims in the medium term to improve the power/weight figures by 30 per cent. The company has already launched a study on a fuel cell solution, which is relatively advanced, while it has just started a study on kinetic energy harvesting.

In December, the Soldato Futuro suite dedicated to the vehicle crew was fully tested at Capo Teulada during the first Freccia firing exercise at company level. Known with the acronym ADI (Individual Set Ensemble), it allows crewmembers to use on-board radios for communicating even if they need to debus, to remain in contact with the infantry squad, and also provides them some of the Soldato Futuro’s services. To improve the comfort the C4I suite as well as the power suite have all been moved to the sides of the electronic vest; a similar solution will probably also be adopted for the series production kits of the infantry version, Selex Communications also aiming at reducing the number of cables while repositioning the various pieces of equipment on the E-vest.

	The ADI is the Soldato Futuro suite aimed at vehicle crews. It allows them to use vehicle radios to remain in touch with the dismounted rifle squad, even if they themselves have to dismount from the vehicle. © P. Valpolini

During the latest stress tests, the Selex Galileo ASPIS integrated rifle sight proved again to be sufficiently mature and its performances were in line with the requirements, a non-negligible feature being that it is one of the lightest systems in its class. Fully linked to the all digital night vision system known as NIMOS, it allows behind the corner observation and firing as well as enabling the transmission of imagery to higher command levels. Current technologies do not allow however to give such capacities while providing a night vision quality comparable to that of standard NVGs while maintaining similar weight and consumption. Only the most advanced NVGs are featured with an integrated sensor fusion overlay which allows the user to see mission information over their view. The NIMOS was developed according to the Army’s original requirements and, according to industry, it fits the requirements. However, how much of that now remains in regards to the priority given to round the corner shooting and picture transmission is open to question and the Army may opt for a further improved night vision capacity instead.

The Army is also fully involved in the selection of the clothing, as some competitors are lining up to providing the full range of technical clothing, using the latest technologies available in that field. As for ballistic protection, the Army is currently fielding a new modular body armour, whose forward and back main plates will provide Level IV protection while add-on elements such as groin protection, dorsal-sacral protection, arms protection and neck-shoulder protection will be Level IIIA. It will feature an increased wearability compared to the current AP-98 and will allow the redistribution of the load between shoulders and hips. The weight in the dynamic operations configuration with front and rear Level IV plates being 8 kg, while the total weight with all modular adds-on is about 12 kg. ■

Paolo Valpolini