Speedy test track for Army vehicles unveiled - Military News | News From Afghanistan, Iraq And Around The World - Military Times

Speedy test track for Army vehicles unveiled

ABERDEEN, Md. — An Abrams tank, a Humvee and other pieces of heavy war machinery thundered down a dusty dirt track Wednesday to officially open the U.S. military's first center for sustained high-speed vehicle testing.

How fast will they go?

Randy Babcock, civilian project manager at the Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, said he got a Humvee up to 60 mph after the track was finished two weeks ago.

"When I first started working here back in the '80s, vehicles drove slow," Babcock said. "I mean, convoy speed was 40-45 mph. Today it's drive as fast as you can to avoid being a target. That would be 60-70 mph, depending on what the vehicle is."

The gravel-covered, 4.5-mile flat oval is the first, $8 million phase of the Automotive Technology Evaluation Facility. A parallel paved track and median will add another $26.8 million to the project's cost over the next two years.

Until now, the military had no way to test its vehicles at high speeds for extended periods, even though convoys in Iraq and Afghanistan travel long distances at over 70 mph to counter enemy threats. The sprawling warfare research center northeast of Baltimore has three other vehicle test areas but the Department of Defense says this is the first of its kind built for flat-out speed.

By testing the limits of handling and stability, engineers hope to reduce the number of vehicle accidents, the No. 1 cause of U.S. military deaths and a leading cause of non-hostile U.S. casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. From fiscal years 2002 to 2006, tactical vehicles in theater were involved in nearly 500 accidents, including 183 rollovers that killed nearly 100 service members, according to a 2009 military task force report.

A large number of rollovers involved Humvees that had been fortified, or up-armored, with thousands of pounds of added armor, according to the report.

John R. Wallace, civilian technical director of the installation's Aberdeen Test Center, said 300 such vehicles in the field have been fitted with black-box-like sensors to record a broad array of data that could help engineers reduce rollover danger.

"What we're doing is looking at performance at the test center and performance in theater in terms of the vehicle and also in terms of the driver," Wallace said.