By Emelie Rutherford
The effort to build an off-road version of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) is benefitting from lessons learned during the highly scrutinized MRAP effort, including modifying how government equipment is added and involving varied Washington officials, a program leader said.
Brig. Gen. Michael Brogan, the Marine Corps Systems Command leader and MRAP joint program executive officer, told Defense Daily a fundamental lesson being applied to the MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV) program is using a single vendor and supply chain. The 16,238-vehicle MRAP program, nearing the end of production, includes five main vendors.
Oshkosh Corp. [OSK] beat four competitors on June 30 for the first M-ATV order from the Army. The company thus far has been tapped to build 3,969 of the off-road vehicles intended for use by all the military services in Afghanistan. The Pentagon currently plans to buy 1,275 more M-ATVs, though that number could change (Defense Daily, Aug. 17).
Brogan, during an interview last week, said he is fairly confident Oshkosh will remain the only prime contractor for M-ATV.
“I don’t want to use definites, because nothing in this world is like that, particularly as we change rapidly,” he said. “(However) it is unlikely that we will require a second source.”
MRAP officials have cited logistical challenges with juggling the multiple vendors for and variants of the initial MRAPs.
Brogan expressed confidence that Oshkosh, by using two production facilities, will ramp up to building 1,000 M-ATVs per month in December.
Another MRAP lesson being applied to the M-ATV program is having the vendor better prepare the vehicles for the government-furnished equipment (GFE) that is added at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR) in Charleston, S.C., Brogan said.
“We know now what the GFE suite is,” he said. “We during the source selection did some rough prototyping of locations. And so we were able to feed back to Oshkosh the specific bracketry, racks, cabling so all that can be installed in the vehicle during manufacture, which means we don’t have to do it at SPAWAR.”
Early in the baseline MRAP effort, he said, military officials “were grinding metal in order to weld things inside vehicles down there, and running our own cables.”
Now, when the Oshkosh M-ATVs arrive at SPAWAR, “it’s much more of a plug-and-play (effort), we just fit things into the racks, ensure everything operates properly, remove our black boxes, ship the vehicles into theater, they install the block boxes over there, and we’re ready to go,” he said. Similar GFE-preparations were made for some of the latter MRAPs, he added.
“That will speed the process at Charleston,” he said.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has expressed a desire to speed up the delivery of M-ATVs to Afghanistan, where troops have suffered increased casualties largely because of improvised explosive devices exploding under up-armored Humvees, which M-ATVs will replace. M-ATVs are expected to arrive in theater in October.
The M-ATV, like the baseline MRAP, emerged from an urgent request from theater. Thus, “speed matters and so we are focused on doing it rapidly but doing it well,” Brogan said.
“A lesson learned was the thoroughness of the source selection, from technical evaluation through the testing at Aberdeen (Proving Ground in Maryland) (to) the cost and price analysis and the involvement of (the Office of the Secretary of Defense) OSD conducting peer reviews,” Brogan said.
Those peer reviews began before the M-ATV request for proposals was released to industry, and continued when the program narrowed the competitors down to five finalists and when Oshkosh was selected as the winner, he said.
“We had that independent set of eyes review our work to keep us out of hot water with the (Department of Defense’s inspector general) DoD IG,” he said.
The DoD IG has criticized the Pentagon for not acting faster than it did to build MRAP vehicles for troops in Iraq and the Marine Corps for not properly determining if vehicle prices were appropriate.
Brogan said M-ATV officials were also careful to keep Congress in the loop as plans for the new vehicle developed.
“We engaged on the Hill early, rather than being summoned up there to explain why we were late, how screwed up we were, what was going wrong,” Brogan said, alluding to concerns expressed by multiple lawmakers about the MRAP program, mainly when it ramped up in 2007.
“We kept them apprised of what was going on in the process, so that they could have a level of comfort, and not be wondering what we were doing over here in the department,” he said.
The new M-ATVs are intended to be lighter and more agile than MRAPs for use in mountainous Afghanistan, which lacks extensive road networks. Some troops in Iraq experienced problems with the hulking MRAPs including rollovers.
Aside from Oshkosh, the other M-ATV bidders were BAE Systems‘ Global Tactical Systems business; BAE’s U.S. Combat Systems unit; Navistar Defense LLC [NAV]; and Force Dynamics LLC, a joint venture between Force Protection, Inc. [FRPT] and General Dynamics [GD].