Oshkosh prepares for long road to JLTV contractA major piece of the puzzle is in place, but Oshkosh Corp. still faces a long and uncertain road as it pursues its next major military contract. https://www.fdlreporter.com/article/20131007/FON0101/310070136/?nclick_check=1 The company will not find out if it wins the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle contract for almost two years, and it would not begin heavy production of the JLTV for another three years after that. But before the company can mark any of those milestones on its calendar, employees face 18 months of make-or-break work to ensure Oshkosh Corp. delivers the most competitive bid possible for the only significant military truck contract on the horizon. To win the contract to build the replacement for the Humvee for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, the company must beat out the nation’s largest defense contractor, Lockheed Martin, and AM General, which manufactured the Humvee. Oshkosh Corp. spokesman John Daggett said the United Auto Workers Local 578’s agreement last month to a five-year contract extension was a key piece of Oshkosh’s effort to secure the contract, but only the beginning of the work to be done. “We’re very, very pleased we were able to partner with the union for that portion of the puzzle,” Daggett said. “But there’s a lot of work ahead of us.” While Oshkosh, Winnebago County and Northeast Wisconsin economies stand to gain if the company wins the contract, officials said they see very little they can do to help the company. In 2009, when Oshkosh Corp. was pursuing its last major military contract, to build Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles trucks, the company turned to Oshkosh and the state for assistance with building a new paint plant that was a key to winning the contract. The city created a tax incremental financing district to provide $5 million to assist the project and the state kicked in $35 million in tax credits. This time around, Oshkosh Corp. hasn’t asked for any local or state assistance. “We’re open to talking with them, but I’m not sure if there’s anything we can do to assist them,” Oshkosh City Manager Mark Rohloff said.Oshkosh Corp. Director of Defense Programs Dave Diersen said the next 14 months will be spent providing support to the Department of Defense as it puts the company’s 22 JLTV prototypes through survivability, performance and reliability tests. Unfortunately, Diersen said the company won’t get to find out how its vehicle fares during testing. “We at Oshkosh will be required to maintain our vehicles, so to speak, but they’re doing the tests and they don’t provide those test results to us immediately,” he said. “Based on our extensive previous testing we’ve done in-house, we’ll be able to figure out how we’re doing, but they won’t release that information.” Only after testing is completed, likely in November or December 2014, will the Department of Defense actually release the request for proposals that will guide the company’s bid for the contract, Diersen said. It’ll be a little like flying blind. “We can’t speculate about what would be in the proposal because they haven’t issued any guidance to industry,” Diersen said. “That’s fairly standard with government.” After the bid is due in early 2015, the company and its competitors will play the waiting game until late summer or early fall when Daggett said the Pentagon would award a low-rate production contract that would likely cover a three-year period before a heavy-rate production contract was issued in 2018. Diersen said Oshkosh Corp. will have spent more than a decade designing, testing and redesigning its JLTV to be attractive to both the government and the soldiers and Marines who will use them by the time the contract is awarded. “One of the keys from an Oshkosh Defense perspective is we try to work very closely with our customer, but also with our end users to determine what they need in the vehicle,” Diersen said. “From feedback we receive from the customer and end-users, they’re pretty happy with it. I think we understand the tactical wheeled vehicle market and we’ve got a very solid product that will make us extremely competitive in the upcoming competition.”