Marine Doubts About Humvee Successor Could Prove DeadlyLast week, I wrote a commentary for Forbes explaining why the sequestration provisions of the 2011 Budget Control Act could result in many U.S. warfighters dying unnecessarily. This week, I’d like to explore how that deadly dynamic would play out by examining the impact of budget cuts on one program — the Army-Marine Corps effort to develop a next-generation jeep.
[url=https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2013/07/22/marine-doubts-about-humvee-successor-could-prove-deadly/]www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2013/07/22/marine-doubts-about-humvee-successor-could-prove-deadly[/url]
The military doesn’t refer to its light utility trucks as jeeps anymore, preferring more technical terminology (“Jeep” is now the trademarked name for Chrysler’s highly successful line of SUVs). The closest thing to a traditional jeep in the joint inventory today is the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, better known as the “humvee.” It’s the same vehicle that General Motors GM +0.22% commercialized as the Hummer — or at least it was before U.S. warfighters began waging counter-insurgency campaigns in places like Somalia and Afghanistan.
Marines recover a humvee damaged in combat. The versatile light truck has been a workhorse for U.S. forces since it debuted in 1985, but it never was intended to be a combat vehicle and cannot be adequately protected against some threats such as improvised explosive devices.
You see, the humvee was never designed to be a combat vehicle. It was conceived in the late 1970s, when the military was focused mainly on preparing for war with the Red Army in Central Europe. War plans envisioned well-defined front lines and rear areas, with the humvee designed to carry out a wide array of support activities far back from the front. Everybody understood that putting a humvee in the line of fire would probably prove fatal to its occupants.
Fast forward a dozen years to the U.S. military intervention in Somalia, and you find U.S. warfighters beginning to grasp the drawbacks of a light truck that isn’t equipped with much protection. Somali insurgents — a fancy name for armed thugs — didn’t understand the concept of front lines and rear areas. They popped up anywhere that it was tactically advantageous, more than happy to exploit the humvee’s vulnerabilities. You can get a good feel for what it was like by viewing the movie Black Hawk Down.
That led to the first concerted efforts to equip the humvee with more protection. But fast forward another dozen years to the war in Iraq, and the advent of improvised explosive devices (universally referred to in military circles as IED’s). By that time, the military had come up with some reasonably effective ways of protecting humvee occupants against lateral attacks from weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades. But when it came to IED’s planted in the ground, or explosively-formed penetrators, there wasn’t a whole lot that could be done.
The humvees being used in war zones were already loaded up with so much armor that the formerly road-hugging vehicle had developed a tendency to tip over on inclines. And the price of each vehicle had doubled from $65,000 to $140,000 — actually, quadrupled when you consider that all the added weight made it wear out twice as fast. And yet “up-armored” humvees still couldn’t cope with underbody or overhead explosions. So much armor eventually was added that it used up all of the vehicle’s margin for carrying payload, giving it what one expert calls a “negative payload.”
It was the impossibility of turning the humvee into a safe combat vehicle that led the Pentagon to embark on a crash program for building heavily armored trucks — Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected “MRAP’s” in military jargon. MRAP’s certainly provided better protection against IED’s and other insurgent weapons, but they were super heavy, which meant there were lots of places they couldn’t go, and their high center of gravity made them even more prone to tipping over. They also were huge gas guzzlers.
MRAP’s saved the day in Iraq, but using them in future conflicts would be a logistical nightmare. The Army recently announced it would sell off or mothball most of the MRAP’s in its fleet, because, in the words of Chief of Staff Ray Odierno, “we simply cannot afford to maintain them.” He probably would have held on to most of them anyway if something better wasn’t available, but it soon will be. It’s an Army-Marine Corps program called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), which is testing three prototypes in preparation for a 2015 contract award.
JLTV is the product of hard-won lessons in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq — a light utility vehicle that reconciles the need for survivability with the imperatives of mobility, versatility and maintainability. It affords the same 360-degree ballistic and blast protection as an MRAP in a much lighter vehicle that is more fuel-efficient than the humvee. By exploiting new automotive and networking technology, the JLTV will deliver a next-generation jeep that is far safer and more supportable than anything in the joint inventory today.
But that brings me to the impact of budget sequestration on joint-force survivability. Last month, Marine Corps Commandant James Amos told a group of reporters that while he likes the new vehicle and his service needs it, if sequestration continues as currently planned, then “it’s questionable whether I can afford JLTV.” With big manpower bills to pay and other pressing needs that must be met such as finding a replacement for 40-year-old amphibious landing vehicles, the Commandant says he may have no choice but to modify his humvees and forego JLTV.
What that means in stark terms is that someday Marines will die unnecessarily in some overseas fight because they will be riding in a humvee that can’t take direct hits the way a JLTV could. Amos knows that, but he also knows that without a new jumpjet and amphibious tractor, he could take even more casualties. Or he could end up with too few troops after budget cuts to get the job done. So he is engaging in budgetary triage, which means the Marines might back out of the JLTV effort.
The Army, which will buy up to 60,000 of the joint vehicles to replace a third or more of its humvees, is standing by the program. That is surprising in at least one sense: it has two other new combat vehicles it will need to buy at the same time, which will make for a very tight budget if sequestration persists. Sequestration hits weapons accounts harder than other types of military spending because of the consequences of cutting personnel and readiness. But Army leaders say they must have JLTV to survive in future wars.
The Marine Corps is signaling that simply may not be feasible in the current fiscal environment, even though it appears to have a window in which to acquire its own JLTV’s before production of the new amphibious tractor ramps up in the next decade. So the safety of Marines in future wars will be sacrificed to keep them ready today and continue other programs deemed to be a higher priority. Amos is too professional to tell the political system bluntly what its budget policies could mean in the wars of tomorrow.
The issue here isn’t whether the Marines should be replacing all of their humvees with Joint Light Tactical Vehicles. Neither service can afford to do that, which is why they have embarked on modification efforts to recover lost performance margins. The issue is whether any of the vehicles in the Marine Corps’ planned fleet of 18,000 light trucks should be something safer than a humvee. If the Marines decide the answer to that question is “no,” then they will be relying in future wars on a vehicle that was not designed for combat.
They will also be undermining the Army’s plan to buy something better. The program of record envisions that nearly a third of all JLTV’s manufactured during the early years of production will be for the Marines, so that they can close out their buy before the new amphibious tractor ramps up. That means if the Marine Corps pulls out, Army costs will surge in a way that could make its own part of the program unaffordable. The Army would have to cover all acquisition costs, and the price-tag for each vehicle would rise significantly.
It isn’t so clear that in the end the JLTV will cost all that much more than trying to modify the humvee into something it was never intended to be. The military still has plenty of uses for humvees and thus they will remain in the joint fleet for decades to come. But it isn’t likely that they will ever be able to survive a direct hit from an IED or a shaped charge. So if budget sequestration forces the Marines to give up on the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, that will likely lead to numerous unnecessary casualties in future wars.