Under the contracts signed between FNSS and Department of National Defense (DND), Philippines which entered into force in August and December 2020, FNSS will provide a number of Amphibious Armored Combat Earthmover (AACE) vehicles and stabilized one-man turrets production, integration and logistics support services to the Philippine Army. These will be the projects under the Defense Industry Cooperation Agreement signed between Turkey and the Philippines governments. It is planned that the turrets will be integrated to the vehicles in October 2021 and training and logistics support services will be completed by December 2021. And the vehicles will be delivered and the training and logistic support services will be completed by the end of March 2023.
Within the modernization program of the Philippine Army, the main goal of the AACE project is to increase the combat engineering capabilities of the combat engineer battalion units and to carry these capabilities to further stages with the ability of the amphibious vehicles. In this scope, the subsystems and mission equipment used in the vehicle has been evaluated and determined according to today’s technological developments in line with this program.
On the other hand, the main goal of the turret project is to upgrade the firepower of existing tracked armored vehicles. In this scope, one-man turrets, which were previously produced and put into service in other countries, will be produced with a state-of-art fire control capability and sight systems (day / night).
Both vehicles and turrets will be manufactured at FNSS facilities, the turrets will be integrated into tracked armored vehicles by FNSS in the Philippines and will then be delivered to the user. The acceptance tests will take place both in Turkey and the Philippines and the training for the vehicles and turrets will be held in Philippines under the integrated logistics support services activities.
AACE, which is the first and only combat engineering dozer vehicle with amphibious capability in the world, has proven itself successfully in the inventory of Turkish Armed Forces and has been exported abroad for the first time with this reference. And one-man turrets of different caliber armaments were the choice of Philippine Army against products of the world’s renown companies with the cost effectiveness and superior technical features.