A NEW APPROACH TO VULNERABILITY ASSESSMENT APPLIED TO LONGBOW APACHE™

In 1987 Congress passed the Live Fire Test Law, requiring all new weapon systems undergo realistic testing against combat threats before being allowed to proceed beyond low-rate initial production. This greatly increased the need to quantity vulnerability early in the system design process so that potential problem areas could be identified and corrected before reaching the gunfire test pad. Creating useful model data for vulnerability analyses is extremely time- and resource-intensive, severely limiting the analyst’s and designer’s ability to produce vulnerability assessments during the critical early stages of system design evolution. McDonnell Douglas Aerospace (MDA), in conjunction with Fortesque Corporation, has developed an alternative methodology that produces COVART (Computation Of Vulnerable Areas & Repair Times) shotline input data files directly from computer-aided design drawing (CADD) databases.