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The day after the Army awarded engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) contracts for its future family of Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTV) to Lockheed Martin [LMT], AM General, and Oshkosh Defense [OSK], the companies have already begun work, company officials said
“Once we got notification (of the contract award) we immediately switched gears from waiting for the announcement to execution,” John Urias, Oshkosh Corp. executive vice president and president of Oshkosh Defense [OSK] told Defense Daily.
Oshkosh Defense was awarded $56.4 million for the JLTV EMD phase. The first deliverables under the contract are due today; more items are due seven days from the start of the contract on Wednesday, he said.
“In my mind, our nation’s warfighter deserves the best equipment industry can provide,” Urias said. “The Oshkosh JLTV is tomorrow’s vehicle today so warfighter can accomplish their missions and get home safely,” Urias said.
The discriminator for Oshkosh Defense was technology, he said. “We worked on this for years,” for example designing six different generations of JLTV vehicles, feeding data–good or bad–back into the design cycle to make it better for the warfighter. A lot of history and experience is applied to the JLTV. The Oshkosh JLTV is called the Light Combat Tactical All-Terrain Vehicle, or L-ATV.
Oshkosh will deliver 22 Oshkosh-designed and manufactured JLTV prototypes within 365 days of contract award, and support government testing and evaluation of the prototypes.
“The Oshkosh JLTV solution was designed with a purpose–to keep Warfighters safe on future battlefields with unpredictable terrain, tactics, and threats,” said John Bryant, vice president and general manager of Joint and Marine Corps Programs for Oshkosh Defense. “We understand how critical this light, protected, off-road vehicle will be to warfighters.”
At AM General, Chris Vanslager, vice president of programs management and business development, told Defense Daily, “the product is ready now.”
The Blast Resistant Vehicle-Off Road (BRV-O) meets 100 percent of the technical requirements the government identified, and has compiled 300,000 miles of testing to produce the “very reliable mature solution, which reduces risk, he said.
AM General received a $64.5 million EMD contract to produce and deliver 22 BRV-O prototypes for government testing.
The program team, operating since the proposal submission, is working to execute the contract, and in some cases ordered long lead items before the contract awards, he said. Additionally, internally, AM General is preparing contract deliverables required early on, such as the briefing package needed before the Start of Work meeting where the Army and the company meet to discuss the contract and work.
Charles Hall, president and CEO of AM General said in a statement, “It’s a tribute to the design, engineering and program management team that developed, built and tested BRV-O, and to the AM General workforce that has established such a great track record of supporting our military customers with innovative, affordable and dependable light tactical vehicle products and services for more than five decades.
The company invested millions of its own funds over the past decade to identify technology, test it and mature it to the point where it could be offered to the government, Vanslager said. “We combined all our unique experience and capability into a program to be able to go ahead and deliver a flexible, modular system.”
The BRV-O maximizes the commonality of parts in the new design. Through its history of producing light tactical vehicles, AM General has built a global supply chain, and many of those suppliers–and in the United States they are found in 43 states–can apply their capabilities to BRV-O and also take advantage of the global network of support already in place.
BRV-O is based on more than a decade of AM General investments in research, development and testing for this next-generation light tactical military vehicle. Its mobility technology, matured to meet Warfighter demands, accumulated more than 300,000 operational test miles and demonstrated high reliability and maintainability.
The JLTV team led by Lockheed Martin received $66.3 million for the JLTV EMD phase.
“We’re ordering long lead items today (Thursday),” Kathryn Hasse, director-Joint Light Tactical Vehicle Program for Lockheed Martin, told reporters in a conference call.
“We did start program performance (yesterday),” she said. For example, to have those vehicles delivered in 12 months, they must be built in roughly nine months so they can go through the test program, she said. Other work includes integrating all the government furnished equipment into the vehicles. Once the vehicles are turned over to the government the team will support that work.
Scott Greene, vice president-Ground Vehicles, said the purpose-built vehicles combine requirements and capabilities in one vehicle that is “affordable, mobile and gives survivability and mobility.”
Hasse said the vehicle began with a “clean sheet of paper,” and was designed to meet warfighter’s requirements. The vehicles now have driven a combined 160,000 test miles.
“We’ve proven the vehicle to be “extremely capable from a performance standpoint and also demonstrated to the government that we’re affordable,” she said.