The State Department has approved a possible $1 billion foreign military sale (FMS) for the delivery of 2,747 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTV) to the United Kingdom, a deal that would be the first international sale of the new light trucks if approved by Congress.
Congress was notified of the potential deal on July 10, which would include the sale of JLTVs as well as baseline integration kits, B-kit armor, maintainer and operator training and U.S. government technical assistance and logistical support. It would be the first international sale of the truck that the U.S. Army and Marine Corps jointly developed to replace portions of their legacy Humvee fleets.
Oshkosh [OSK], which manufactures JLTV in Wisconsin, will provide minimum contractor support in the initial phase of the deal until the U.K. can take over internal support. The order, announced July 11 by the Defense Security Cooperation Agency came in appreciably higher than the 750 Maj. Gen. Robert Talbot-Rice, land equipment director at the U.K. defense ministry, said in January the U.K. military would buy. Talbot-Rice said during a public appearance in London that the U.K. military filed a letter of request was filed for JLTVs to support its multirole vehicle-protected, or MRV-P, program.
Oshkosh’s Defense division holds the contract to initially build 16,901 JLTVs for the Army and Marine Corps. The Army plans to buy 45,000 trucks while the Marines will buy 5,500. Both services have expressed interest in buying more than the current programs of record call for. Marine Corps Gen. Robert Neller has his sights set on nearly 10,000 of the heavily armored trucks.
The company plans to produce about 750 JLTV trucks in 2017. Since the 2015 contract award, the Army has placed four JLTV orders totaling 1,398 vehicles, according to Oshkosh vice president and general manager of defense programs Dave Dierson. The vehicles are still in low-rate initial production (LRIP) with a decision on full-rate production expected in 2018.
Oshkosh began delivering the first low-rate initial production vehicles to the Army in late September and will continue delivery of groups of vehicles at the end of each month until production ramps up to full-rate.
Oshkosh and the government designed JLTV to be an international program and both the Joint Program Office and the company are confident they can fulfill international orders without upsetting the U.S. program.
“No other country will have an order anywhere near as large as the U.S. Army, so we expect any international orders would be able to fold into our current production,” Dierson told sister publication Defense Daily in a previous interview.