The General Tactical Vehicle (GTV) Joint Venture between General Dynamics [GD] and AM General continues work on its Army-Marine Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) offering while the government moves through source selection for the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) portion of the program.
“We’re already receiving evaluation notifications” from the government, said Don Howe, senior director of GTV for the JLTV program. “We’ve answered all of them and expect to get more.”
As many as three contract awards are likely this summer.
GTV’s JLTV offering, the EAGLE vehicle, carried the EMD proposal to Army TACOM Life Cycle Management Command at the end of March (Defense Daily, March 27).
At the same time, the EAGLE delivered a video showing the vehicle in testing in Germany and in Afghanistan. The video is posted on the General Dynamics Land Systems and GTV websites.
GTV, and teams led by Lockheed Martin [LMT]-BAE Systems , and a BAE-Navistar International [NAVZ] entry completed the technology demonstration (TD) phase of the program a year ago.
Now, six teams are competing for the EMD work. GTV, the Lockheed Martin-BAE Systems Team, a BAE-Northrop Grumman [NOC] team, Oshkosh [OSK], Navistar and AM General.
The JLTV EMD acquisition approach made a radical change, Howe said. “Last summer, it looked like the JLTV program was all but dead.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said he was not prepared to fund the program since he didn’t agree with the acquisition strategy. The Army and Marines made changes.
“We think they made the right choices,” Howe said. “We think it was the right thing to do at the right time for the right reasons.”
The 47-month developmental period with extensive tests shrank to 27 months, and the cost changed from a unit manufacturing cost in the mid-to-high $400,000s to the more affordable $260,000 range.
“We think it’s doable, absolutely,” he said. “We support this acquisition strategy 100 percent.”
The whole purpose of the TD phase was to allow the government to assess requirements they were identifying and make informed decisions in the EMD phase, to see if they were going down the right path and prioritizing correctly, he said.
The EMD phase also opens the trade space, instead of more than 900 requirements that had to be met to a set of tiered and prioritized items.
“For us (GTV), it allowed us to determine which items we were working on were valuable and which were not,” Howe said.
Thus, the GTV product offering submitted in the TD phase is not the product offered now, he said.
With the changed acquisition strategy, GTV leveraged lessons learned and looked at all possible offerings in the General Dynamics family to see which product best suited the requirements.
That turned out to be the GD European Land Systems’ EAGLE vehicle. “We felt in going forward with that product, the (non-developmental vehicle) jumped us ahead in terms of timelines, to be able to compete, and gave a level of maturity, having an existing vehicle, that offered immediate design maturity,” he said.
To date, more than 400 EAGLE vehicles have been produced and delivered to the German army and more than half of those have been deployed to Afghanistan.
There are “1.4 million fleet miles on vehicles, over 440,000 of those miles are combat miles,” he said.
American soldiers and Marines have seen the EAGLE and in some cases have actually ridden in it, he said. The vehicle has also been tested at German test sites similar to Yuma or Aberdeen Proving Ground, and have “demonstrated reliability of over 5,200 mean miles between mission failure, above the RFP requirement of 3,600,” he said. It also meets all the transporting requirements.
GTV has moved to optimize the vehicle in certain specific areas. For example, adjustments were made to meet unique U.S. protection requirements and C4 systems were optimized.
“We’re working aggressively on IRAD (internal research and development) for areas we are optimizing,” he said.
“We restricted changes to a very, very few so we don’t move off the common thread” of a designed and tested vehicle, he said. The same group, and in some cases the same people, including Howe, worked on this project as on the GD Stryker family of vehicles, which also reduces risk.
Even though the EMD proposal is different than the TD effort, “nothing is wasted, the information gathered and lessons learned do not go to waste,” he said.