MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va–The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) is an armored vehicle at its core, but the Army and Marine Corps’ new tactical truck has many of the same features as the Chevy Silverado with which it shares an engine.
It comes with power mirrors. Air conditioning is standard and impressively effective on a 90-degree day in Northern Virginia. A central touchscreen display shows diagnostic information like tire pressure and speed. The truck comes with a backup camera and both the driver and front seat passenger have cup holders in the console.
The steering wheel, automatic transmission and pedals also are almost identical to a heavy-duty truck, but that is where the similarities end between the JLTV and its commercial cousins.
During a demonstration of the Oshkosh [OSK] Defense-built JLTV at an off-road course at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Defense Daily sat shotgun while the JLTV was put through its paces. With the Tak4i independent suspension, each tire has a 20-inch range of motion. That allowed the vehicle to take railroad ties and volley-ball sized gravel at 30 miles per hour without uncomfortably jostling passengers.
It crisscrossed a four-foot-deep v-shaped culvert with ease and climbed a stone staircase with 16-inch risers without a hitch. Senior Test Technician Bradon Zeitler, who drove during Defense Daily’s demonstration, has several thousand miles behind the wheel in his nine years with the JLTV program.
“It is almost exactly like driving a large truck,” he said. “It’s incredibly easy to learn to operate. The Humvee just couldn’t do what we’re doing in this vehicle, throwing fist-sized rocks out behind the tires going up a slope at 33 miles an hour.”
Col. Shane Fullmer, chief of the JLTV Joint Program Office (JPO), said the JLTV’s suspension is its defining capability. Through the touchscreen display, the driver can raise and lower the ride height and/or independently control the height of each tire, allowing for leveling of the chassis in uneven terrain. Ultimately, it provides unparalleled mobility in treacherous environments while providing a relatively comfortable ride for troops that could have to fight when they reach their destination.
No special training is required to drive the JLTV. The principles are nearly identical to a Humvee, on which a soldier can earn a license in about two days.
The base engine – block, pistons and other major components – is based on the commercial-off-the-shelf GM Duramax diesel that powers the Chevy Silverado, but it has been adapted to military JP8 fuel and other military required specification, Dave Dierson, vice president and general manager for Joint Programs at Oshkosh, said.
It is the first vehicle built with an integral network “backbone” with an open-architecture interface that allows plug-and-play interoperability with radios and sensors, Fullmer said.
Soldiers and Marines eager to get their hands on the JLTV have a while yet to wait. Operational test and evaluation in preparation for full-rate production (FRP) and a fielding decision is scheduled for the January and February 2018 timeframe, Fullmer said.
The Marine Corps has decided that an infantry battalion within 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force based at Camp Lejeune, N.C., will receive the first 69 fielded JLTVs in January and February 2019. The specific battalion has not been chosen.
A brigade in the 10th Mountain Division will get the Army’s first operational JLTVs. About the same time as the Marine Corps, the brigade will receive 500 trucks to replace about that many Humvees in a three-battalion infantry brigade combat team, Fullmer said.
“The analysis that we’ve run is that where you could fit 100 Humvees before, you can fit 98 JLTVs,” said Andrew Rogers, who runs the Marine Corps’ JLTV effort for the JPO.
The vehicles are in low-rate initial production (LRIP) now. Oshkosh has delivered about 250 trucks so far, Dierson said. The existing contract calls for three years of LRIP and five years of full-rate production. An FRP decision is expected in late 2018.
JLTV comes in two base versions – a two-door utility “pickup truck” model and a four-door model. The four-door version can be configured in three variants. A mobile weapon carrier, by ordering them with, or by adding, B kits. It can be configured as a general-purpose vehicle, a heavy guns carrier mounted with a .50 caliber machine gun or a close-combat weapons carrier sporting a TOW missile launcher.
“It’s a kitted approach,” Fullmer said. “So, we don’t spend money to facilitate everything that would possibly be on the vehicle. We focus each vehicle and its kits to successfully replace the Humvee that we know it’s going to replace. We predict which Humvee, which parking spot we’re going to, what pieces of kit are on that Humvee, we go there, we take those pieces of kit off, we put them on our JLTV.”
JLTV was a pioneer of competitive prototyping as a method of controlling requirements creep and cost. It began in 2007 with three industry participants demonstrating what was technologically possible in a four-wheeled combat-capable armored truck.
“We were after the art of the possible, what could we achieve and what we decided was that it really wasn’t affordable and that we had to get back to what was a more solid … need than a want,” Fullmer said.
The tech demonstration resulted in a list of about 1,000 base requirements for a tactical truck with Humvee-like mobility and MRAP-like troop protection for about $250,000 apiece. In 2012, three companies – Lockheed Martin [LMT], AM General and Oshkosh – returned with engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) prototypes that underwent another two-year round of testing and evaluation by the Army and Marine Corps. AM General makes the Humvee.
Oshkosh rose to the surface and is now building the trucks under a $6.7 billion contract. The company, Army, Marine Corps and the joint program office are in agreement that the multi-part competitive process is a model structure for other acquisition efforts, despite the derision other joint or multi-service programs have attracted.
“I think we used competitive prototyping to help us understand requirements and I think that can be used anywhere,” Fullmer said. “If you’re talking about a ship, you couldn’t competitively prototype battleships but you could competitively prototype engines.”
“We also think working closely with our user representative to determine exactly what the requirements are that we need, not just what we want … and then we used competition to help us layer those requirements in a way that we got the best performance for the least amount of cost.”
Asked whether the military should look at troubled programs like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and be warry of future multi-service acquisition efforts, Oshkosh Defense President John Bryant did not hesitate to quash the notion.
“When people say they fear joint programs, I would point them to the JLTV to see one done right,” he said.