The Army awarded Oshkosh Defense a $6.75 billion contract for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) today, covering 17,000 vehicles for the Army and for the Marine Corps.
AM General, Lockheed Martin and Oshkosh have been competing for the contract for the largest recent ground vehicle program, which replaces the aging Humvee. The three were picked in 2012 to build prototypes for testing, and in February they submitted their bids for the low-rate initial production contract.
“Procurement of 5,500 USMC vehicles are front-loaded into the JLTV production plan. Initial USMC operating capability is expected in Fiscal Year 2018 with fielding to Marine Corps complete in FY2022,” read a statement from the U.S. Army.
“The Army anticipates having its first unit equipped in FY2018. Army procurement will last until approximately 2040 and replace a significant portion of the Army’s legacy light tactical vehicle fleet with 49,099 new vehicles.”
The Army anticipates having its first unit equipped in FY2018. Army procurement will last until approximately 2040 and replace a significant portion of the Army’s legacy light tactical vehicle fleet with 49,099 new vehicles.
During three years of low-rate initial production, Oshkosh Defense will build approximately 17,000 JLTVs for the Army and Marine Corps before moving into five years of full-rate production, according to a March Congressional Research Service report on the program.
Pentagon testers have found that Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) prototypes are slow to deploy from ship to shore and, therefore, leaves US Marine Corps (USMC) units "vulnerable to threats".
The Director of Operational Test and Evaluation annual report on the previous year's testing, released on 20 January, found that during developmental test/operational test (DT/OT) events, USMC units with JLTVs were able to execute amphibious assault missions, but were hampered by the new trucks' lack of deployability.
The race to replace the iconic Humvee has entered its final stretch. Today, the Army gave competing contractors AM General, Oshkosh, and Lockheed Martin the final Request For Proposal for production of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. The competitors have until February 5 to ask the government questions and must submit their proposals by Feb. 10.
After that? “We continue to look forward to a Milestone C decision [to enter production] and the award of a firm-fixed-price contract to a single vendor near the end of Fiscal Year 2015 [i.e. before October 1st],” said Scott Davis, the Army’s Program Executive Officer (PEO) for support systems, in a statement.
At stake for industry: an eight-year award for 17,000 JLTVs — and a de facto lock on what’s expected to be a 50,000-vehicle program with a quarter-century of production and untold decades of sustainment afterwards. At stake for the Army and Marines: a new truck that combines the offroad mobility of the original, dangerously fragile unarmored Humvee with the life-saving protection of the lumbering MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected) bought for Afghanistan and Iraq. With more ambitious programs like the Army Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) and the Marine Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) respectively in ruins or greatly scaled back, JLTV is the biggest ground vehicle modernization program going — assuming sequestration doesn’t kill it first.
As the joint light tactical vehicle program heads toward the end of its engineering, manufacturing and development phase, the military is testing each competitors’ manufacturing prowess.
Lockheed Martin announced Sept. 5 that its team had completed a production readiness review that evaluated the company’s manufacturing capabilities in terms of schedule, performance, cost and risk. The review was conducted at the company’s Camden, Arkansas, ground vehicle assembly facility.
“During the PRR we demonstrated to the satisfaction of the customer that the Lockheed Martin JLTV team is ready for full-rate production in Camden,” said Scott Greene, vice president of ground vehicles at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. “We did this through two days of presentations and factory line visits where we provided a government team with proof of our ability to produce the JLTV vehicle now.”
To further demonstrate the facility’s capabilities, the company assembled its JLTV variant from the ground up during the PRR, a process that took about 10 hours, Greene said. This was not a required part of the review.
The joint light tactical vehicle is slated to replace the Army and Marine Corps’ Humvee fleets. The services plan on buying 48,000 and 5,500 vehicles, respectively.
The completion of the production readiness review was a significant milestone for Lockheed, which does not have as much experience manufacturing ground vehicles as the other two competitors in the program, Oshkosh Defense and AM General.
Incumbent AM General, which produced the Humvee, completed its PRR at the end of August, Chris Vanslager, the company’s vice president of program management and business development, told National Defense. Its blast resistant vehicle-off road vehicle, or BRV-O, would be produced at the same Mishawaka, Indiana, plant where Humvees and other light tactical vehicles are assembled.
“We have incorporated the joint light tactical vehicle production processes right into our existing hot production base for the Humvee,” he said. This allows the JLTV to benefit from lessons learned from other vehicles and the experience of AM General’s workforce, he added.
“If you talk about the Humvee line or the special forces line or the foreign military market line, the JLTV stays in line with that flexible, kitted approach, contributing to affordability without having to add special tools,” he added.
A spokeswoman for Oshkosh declined to comment on the program. The company is offering its light combat tactical all-terrain vehicle, known as the L-ATV.
Lockheed, Oshkosh and AM General entered the EMD phase in 2012 and have since built 22 vehicles for testing.
“We’re in a really tough competition…a knife fight in [a] phone booth,” said Tom Kelly, who runs Lockheed Martin’s government relations for the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program.
In the defense contracting world writ large, Lockheed is the 800-pound gorilla. In the three-way competition to replace the aging Humvee, however, Lockheed is the odd duck next to truck-makers AM General and Oshkosh. Best known for high-tech, high-cost, and high-controversy projects like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the EELV satellite-launching rocket, Lockheed must convince the military that its space-age infrastructure is an asset, not just overhead, when it comes to building what’s basically an armored truck.
So this August, even as Pentagon brass and bureaucrats descend on all three competitors for a “production readiness review,” Lockheed Martin will turn on its JLTV production line in Camden, Arkansas, executives told me this morning. That will be especially impressive because, until this spring, the production line was 400 miles away in Sealy, Texas.
“This isn’t a new line; we literally picked up the line and moved it,” said Scott Greene, Vice-President for Ground Vehicles at Lockheed’s Missile & Fire Control division. The Sealy factory belonged to Lockheed’s partner BAE Systems, a major manufacturer of ground combat vehicles. Among other things, Sealy built the Caiman variant of the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected Vehicle. MRAPs were the short-term replacement for the vulnerable Humvee but proved too massive and unmaneuverable for most missions beyond Afghanistan, which is the reason the military started the JLTV program in the first place. BAE remains Lockheed’s partner on JLTV, but they’re closing the Sealy plant, where Lockheed’s JLTV prototypes were all built.
“What would appear to some to be a disadvantage, for us is a significant advantage,” argued Harold O’Neal, VP for Production Operations, because moving the line was a golden opportunity to rebuild it with improvements drawing on both BAE and Lockheed expertise. “By the 18th of August, which is just a few weeks away,” he said, the line will be humming and running tests with an already-built JLTV prototype. “We could do it today, but we’re [first] verifying every single adjustment and modification we’ve made,” he said. Then, sometime in the fourth quarter, the Camden line will start building all-new JLTVs.
Lockheed won’t deliver those vehicles to the government: The Pentagon doesn’t plan to choose the winning bidder until 2015, and looming sequestration cuts could delay that decision. Instead, the company is building those JLTVs for its own tests, the first test being whether the relocated and upgraded line builds them perfectly as planned.
