Lockheed to Start JLTV Factory Before Contractor Selection

“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.

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