It is 0300hrs in a combat zone. A mechanized infantry platoon sergeant receives word that one of his Soldiers is down in a building on the objective. He needs to set up a casualty collection point and get to that Soldier fast. The problem is that every building on the block looks the same, and the last time he saw the plan was on a sand table hours ago at the Patrol base. Now he is working from a paper map with hand-drawn graphics, trying to match it to what he sees on the ground. Every moment spent thinking is a moment his Soldier can’t afford.
This is the kind of situation that Jonathan Pope, a retired Army noncommissioned officer and Bradley Master Gunner who now serves as Manager of Emerging Technologies at American Rheinmetall, lived through as a platoon sergeant. Pope was hired to bring his Warfighter experience into the design of the Lynx XM30, the company’s next-generation combat vehicle competing to replace the Bradley.
In Pope’s view, designing a combat vehicle must account for what actually happens in the field, in combat, where Soldiers’ lives depend on how that vehicle performs. That means designing from the Warfighter’s perspective from the start, not simply building to a spec sheet.
At American Rheinmetall, the decision to put Warfighter experience at the center of the Lynx XM30 design was made before the Army even published formal requirements, when the team was limited to working with a broad set of Characteristics-of-Need like lethality, mobility, and survivability. CEO Matt Warnick and the company’s leadership not only brought combat-experienced Soldiers into the engineering process right away but gave them a real voice in designing the vehicle.
“We’ve got to get ahead of the requirements and design from a Warfighter perspective from the beginning,” was the directive, according to Pope, who was among the first hires made specifically to influence the vehicle’s design. “And then we adjusted to the requirements as they came.”
Hiring for the Seat, Not the Stars
Defense companies routinely hire retired senior officers and senior enlisted leaders, often for their leadership, relationships, and familiarity with military programs. But American Rheinmetall started somewhere else on the Lynx XM30 program. It prioritized finding someone who had recently been in the turret, training crews, and operating the Bradley in combat conditions, and Pope fit that description. A combat veteran with multiple deployments, he had served as a Master Gunner in both infantry and armor units and was working at the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning when he got the opportunity.
“Rank did not matter to Matt Warnick or anyone else here,” Pope said. “What mattered was my experience. I wasn’t far removed from sitting in that Bradley seat myself and training on it every day.”
Like Army aviation, where every officer knows the value of a CW5 who can tell them what is actually happening in the cockpit, Pope and the other American Rheinmetall Master Gunners fill that role on the XM30 program.
Pope’s first weeks on the job illustrated how seriously American Rheinmetall stands behind this approach. After arriving in Germany to evaluate Rheinmetall’s Lynx KF41, the vehicle that would serve as the starting point for the Lynx XM30, Pope began cataloging friction points from a U.S. Army Soldier’s perspective. When Warnick called to check in, Pope mentioned he had been keeping a notebook. Warnick’s response was immediate. He set up a meeting with the entire team that week so Pope could share his findings, and they were addressed right away.
“The first time someone pushed back and said, ‘it’s not a requirement,’ Matt stopped them,” Pope said. “This is feedback from the Warfighter perspective. It gets listened to.”
Soldier Touchpoints: Validating with Active Units
Pope and all the Master Gunners on American Rheinmetall’s Lynx XM30 team bring decades of combat experience, but they recognize that Soldiers who left service years ago are not facing the same conditions as those serving today. Their expertise provides what Pope calls the 70 to 80 percent solution. The remaining gap is closed through Soldier Touchpoints, structured feedback sessions with active-duty units.
American Rheinmetall’s Lynx XM30 team, in conjunction with the Army, has conducted three Soldier Touchpoints that have proven essential to translating combat experience into design decisions. Soldiers worked through user stories drawn from the company’s 72-hour Operational Mode Summary/Mission Profile, walking fire commands, task handoffs, and mission scenarios in real operational context. “We don’t lead them,” Pope said. “We give them their scenario and say, ‘Tell me where you want the button. Tell me where you want the switch.'”
The value of those sessions is visible throughout the vehicle. Soldiers’ operational and functional input drove concrete design updates, from how the human-machine interface is organized to where critical controls are configured. Their feedback pushed the Lynx XM30 design from the 70 to 80 percent solution to the final 100% solution. That gap, the difference between experienced judgment and current conditions, is exactly what Soldier Touchpoints are designed to close.
In the Bradley, gunners learned their controls by feel. Pope used to blindfold his crews during training so they could operate the weapons control panel without looking, a process he likened to learning braille. While the Lynx XM30 replaces mechanical controls with digital screens, the principle remains the same: crews need to know where everything is without hesitation. Where a function lives in a menu matters as much as where a switch sat on a panel, and Soldier Touchpoints let active-duty crews guide those decisions.
Task Fluidity: Solving the Two-Crew Problem
The Army’s requirement for a two-Soldier crew, down from the Bradley’s three, presented one of the program’s most significant design challenges, and Pope understood the problem firsthand. In the Bradley, the gunner can only manipulate the turret and talk on the radio. The gunner cannot assist the vehicle commander with anything else because the position demands full physical engagement with the sighting system, a limitation the three-person crew structure absorbed. But with a two-Soldier crew, that margin doesn’t exist.
American Rheinmetall found the answer by studying Army aviation. Working with Bell, a Textron company and Team Lynx partner, the team studied how two-person helicopter crews manage task handoff in flight. What they found was a model that could be translated directly to the Lynx XM30. The Lynx XM30’s task fluidity concept grew directly out of that work with Bell. “That’s the reason there are driver pedals on both sides in the vehicle and why both crew members have direct access to a shared, movable screen,” Pope said.
American Rheinmetall has also pushed past the Army’s baseline cognitive load testing, partnering with Bell’s human factors team and the Army’s Crew Optimization and Augmentation Team to incorporate brain wave monitoring during simulation exercises.
“The requirements are the floor, not the ceiling,” Pope said. “We’ve built in many features that will further reduce cognitive load beyond the requirements. I won’t disclose the details, but leaders employing the Lynx XM30 won’t be navigating off a paper map.”
Built for the Fight
American Rheinmetall will meet the Army’s requirements for the Lynx XM30. But requirements are the minimum. They do not account for what happens at 0300hrs when a platoon sergeant needs to find that wounded Soldier in a building he can barely identify, or when a change of mission hits mid-movement and the entire plan must be redrawn in minutes.
Those are the conditions where design decisions made years earlier determine whether a vehicle works for the Soldiers or against them, and American Rheinmetall is building the Lynx XM30 with that reality in mind. Its approach to design puts Warfighter experience front and center and treats the Soldiers as the authority on how it should perform. That is what it means to design for the Soldier, not the spec sheet.