US Army Released New RFP for Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle Program

The US Army wants to delay the start of one of its most prized vehicle modernization programs by one year and raise its development costs by several hundred million dollars in its quest to replace thousands of Vietnam-era M113 infantry carriers by the early 2020s.

On Tuesday, the Army released a new draft request for proposals for the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) program, following a previous draft request issued in March.

The Army wants to buy 2,097 AMPVs over 13 years costing roughly $1.8 million apiece. The latest document does not include an average unit manufacturing cost, unlike the March draft.

The new document says the Army plans to award a five-year engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contract in May 2014 to one contractor, which will manufacture 29 vehicles for government testing, followed by a three-year low-rate initial production (LRIP) contract starting in 2020.

In the March draft document, the Army estimated that the EMD phase would run four years, from fiscal years 2014 to 2017, and cost $388 million. But the latest document has it running for five years, from fiscal 2015 to 2019 at a cost of $458 million to build the 29 prototypes.

Likewise, the previous estimate for an LRIP order of 289 vehicles between 2018 and 2020 was estimated at $1.08 billion, but the Oct. 1 draft includes a chart that lists three options for the LRIP years pegged at $244 million, $479 million, and $505 million respectively, which comes to $1.2 billion, giving the program a $1.68 billion budget before full-rate production begins.

That’s about $200 million more than the overall $1.46 billion cost that the March request for proposals estimated. The Army requested $116 million in its fiscal 2014 budget for development activities for the AMPV, which Congress approved.

Two main competitors have lined up for the competition. BAE Systems is offering a variant of its turretless Bradley, while General Dynamics is offering either its wheeled double V-hull Stryker, or a newer tracked version of the Stryker.

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