By
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on April 22, 2021 at 12:32 PM
A soldier refuels his gas-guzzling MRAP armored truck in Afghanistan.
WASHINGTON: How do you recharge electric vehicles on the battlefield? Army Futures Command is looking for out-of-the-box ideas, so it’s awarded $600,000 in concept development grants to six companies that don’t normally do business with the military.
Refueling Army formations is a huge logistical problem – fuel convoys in Afghanistan and Iraq were often more dangerous than combat patrols – but moving from fossil fuel to electric vehicles raises logistical dilemmas of its own. There’s no infrastructure of charging stations (or gas pumps) on the battlefield, so you need a fast way to transfer power in difficult places.