The Army hopes to review all the responses from its third draft request for proposals (RFP) for its Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) program next week, allowing for a meeting with top acquisition officials in November and a subsequent release of a final RFP soon after. 
Col. Bill Sheehy, program manager for the Armored Brigade Combat Team, said during a media briefing at the Association of the United States Army’s annual meeting and exposition that his office just finished compiling the responses it received during the most recent back-and-forth with industry.
”We are engaging with them on an iterative basis to ensure that we can deliver something quickly to the Army for best value,” he said. After making final adjustments to the language of the RFP, Sheehy will send it to Army acquisition executive Heidi Shyu and Pentagon acquisition chief Frank Kendall for approval.
Asked about the long acquisition schedule for the program–full-rate production wouldn’t begin until fiscal year 2020 under the current plan–Sheehy said, “we are defining success for production as our ability to get through Limited User Test, LUT, which occurs during [the engineering and manufacturing development phase].” Once the program passes its LUT, if a new combat contingency arose, “we can quickly ramp up the production for that theater.”
Sheehy added that the production schedule was set based on expected budgets, but he said industry had proven during operations in Iraq and Afghanistan that it could ramp up production rates as needed to support combat operations.