USMC To Cut Vehicle ProcurementThe wheels are about to fall off the vehicle-buying bonanza that has been driving Pentagon procurement in recent years.
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“We have 40,000 vehicles in the Marine Corps,” said Gen. James Amos, U.S. Marine Corps Commandant, during an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations on Oct. 26. “We need about 30,000. We’re not going to recapitalize all of those vehicles.”
The Marines, he says, are going to buy “what’s good enough” to get through the next several years.
Combined, 2010 contracts and modifications for tracked and wheeled vehicles total $12.8 billion, more than any other single expense that year for the Defense Department, according to an Aviation Week Intelligence Network (AWIN) analysis of a database created by AWIN with information aggregated by the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting (See charts, pages 7-8).
Individually, tracked combat, assault and tactical vehicle procurement rank eighth among Pentagon expenses, with $5 billion in transactions; wheeled truck, tractor and similar transactions rank ninth, with $4.7 billion in transactions; and wheeled combat, assault and tactical vehicle deals rank 14th, with $3.1 billion, the AWIN analysis shows.
Wheeled-vehicle procurement will likely see the most immediate effect of the Marine Corps acquisition reversal. Leading contractors for those vehicles include Oshkosh Corp., Canadian Commercial Corp. and Textron. Oshkosh ranked fourth among all Pentagon contractors in 2010, with $5.4 billion in transactions, the analysis finds.
While up-armored, high-mobility, multipurpose wheeled vehicles — usually called Humvees — have served their purpose protecting passengers against improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq, Amos says the vehicles are clearly outmatched in Afghanistan.
Calling the Afghanistan IEDs “huge,” Amos said, “They will take a Humvee – I don’t care how much armored up – and destroy it.”
He estimates that the Marine Corps will settle for about a quarter of the Humvee fleet it now has and invest more money in the joint light tactical vehicle (JLTV) program. That is where the investment is needed, he says.
Meant to replace Humvees, JLTVs are supposed to feature scalable armor, defensive measures, networked communications and enhanced mobility and agility. But the JLTV program has its own issues, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released Oct. 26.
The U.S. Army also is counting on the JLTV and has started to rework its plans to develop and acquire the vehicles. “These efforts have just begun, however, and their results are not yet assured,” the GAO notes.
“To reduce risk in the JLTV program, the services relied on multiple vendors during technology development to increase their knowledge of the needed technologies, determine the technology maturity level, and determine which requirements were achievable,” the GAO reports. “As a result, the services identified trades in requirements to drive down the cost of the vehicle. For example, the services found that JLTV could not achieve both protection level and transportability goals, so the services are accepting a heavier vehicle. A potential risk for the services in allowing industry to build vehicles for testing is that the prototypes may not be mature.”
The fiscal 2012 budget includes $243.9 million for JLTV research and development.