Lockheed Discloses Testing Of ‘Multi-Mission Truck’

AURORA, Colorado—Lockheed Martin has conducted initial drop tests of an air-launched variant of the Common Multi-Mission Truck (CMMT) vehicle, a compact, low-cost system that is designed for a range of roles including deployment as an affordable mass weapon.

The CMMT leverages Lockheed Martin’s Rapid Dragon palletized munitions platform concept that enables weapons to be dropped from airlifters such as the C-130 and C-17 and is scalable for a variety of capabilities. As well as a variant for air launch from U.S. Air Force airlifters, fighters and bombers, Lockheed is also developing a smaller long-range launched effect CMMT version that deploys from rotary-wing platforms.

The air-launched CMMT is expected to undergo further “preflight” air drop tests later this year, says Michael Rothstein, vice president, strategy and requirements–air weapons and sensors, at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. Building on Rapid Dragon, CMMT “takes that same concept. You resize potentially the pallet, instead of holding JASSM (AGM-158 Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile), you maybe hold something a little smaller. And instead of putting maybe nine in this box of pallets, you put 25 of them.

“I say weapon, but you really need to think about CMMT as an air vehicle, because from the get[-go] this air vehicle was designed to be modular, with open architectures that will make it much easier for suppliers to plug and play their components in ways that we haven’t really done before,” says Rothstein, who was speaking at the Air Force Association’s Warfare Symposium on March 3.

Rothstein adds that CMMT would, for example, “fit right into” the Air Force’s recently revealed Franklin project, a collaboration with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) called the Enterprise Test Vehicle (ETV). Under ETV, the DIU plans to create a low-cost vehicle to test different subsystems. The Air Force wants to take the ETV, put a munition on it and turn it into a cheap cruise missile. 

“One of the things we’re going to do later this year is show the ability to plug and play three different engines on the same day. We’re going to put this engine to see if it will work, then put this engine to work and then another engine to work, because you have got to have the supply chain to get there,” Rothstein says.

“Part of our concept is to make the manufacturing easily deployable, easily repeatable, whether it’s different places in the United States, whether it’s with international partners, whether it’s in theaters. So instead of this large place that you’re stuck in one place where you’re building munitions, then you got to figure logistically well, how do we aggregate the pieces of parts so they’re easily put together in some place forward?” he adds.

Testing is ramping up using versions of the Rapid Dragon system for initial evaluations, Rothstein says. “Just this weekend we did a drop test using the latest iteration of Rapid Dragon. This was kind of more of a lab test. We’re going to do a preflight test later this year, but we dropped it out of that design, which is essentially simulating a pallet on a parachute, to drop it out to make sure it’s working and nothing’s going to hit. So this is a step, and we’re bending actual metal.”