Industry ready now for Joint Light Tactical Vehicle

WASHINGTON — Indus­try bid­ders will respond March 13 to the most recent gov­ern­ment request for solu­tions to mod­ern­ize the light tac­ti­cal vehi­cle fleet — and they don’t need any more time than that to do so, because they are pre­pared now.

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Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle pro­to­type 2
Army offi­cials say indus­try is ready now to begin devel­op­ing the Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle for the Army. While mul­ti­ple pro­to­type JLTV vehi­cles exist, the Army has yet to choose one as the service’s newest vehi­cle.
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Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle pro­to­type 1
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Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle pro­to­type 3
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“Indus­try, they don’t need anoth­er two years to design this vehi­cle,” said Col. Dave Bas­sett, the project man­ag­er for Army tac­ti­cal vehi­cles. “They are ready now to respond with mature designs to our solicitation.” 

Bas­sett, along with Kevin M. Fahey, the Army’s pro­gram exec­u­tive offi­cer for com­bat sup­port and com­bat ser­vice sup­port, spoke Feb. 23 in Fort Laud­erdale, Fla., dur­ing a media oppor­tu­ni­ty at the Asso­ci­a­tion of the U.S. Army’s Insti­tute of Land Warfare’s Win­ter Sym­po­sium and Expo­si­tion Feb. 23. 

“I have not seen sub­stan­tial pres­sure to slow this pro­gram down,” Bas­sett said. “The feed­back we have got from indus­try con­firmed we have folks pre­pared to bid mature designs now.” 

Fahey agreed. He said that indus­try is ready to present their options for the Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle, or JLTV, and that the Army and Marine Corps pro­gram is struc­tured as-is with cur­rent bud­get con­sid­er­a­tions in mind. 

“One of the num­ber one things is keep it focused, and from an Army and Marine Corps per­spec­tive, the pro­gram now as struc­tured and the sched­ule we [are] on is also con­sis­tent with our fis­cal con­straints on how we are going to fund the capa­bil­i­ty we need over time.” 

The Army released the Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle engi­neer­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing devel­op­ment phase request for pro­pos­al, known as an RFP, Jan. 26. Indus­try has until March 13 to respond. 

Bas­sett said in the JLTV tech­nol­o­gy devel­op­ment phase, the pro­gram received crit­i­cism because it was chang­ing require­ments and the sched­ule was slip­ping, but he said the TD phase “did exact­ly what it was intend­ed to do, which is it gave us an oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn about our require­ments, and learn the rela­tion­ships between those require­ments and costs.” 

It also allowed the Army to focus on the capa­bil­i­ty gaps that had to be sat­is­fied by the JLTV — pro­tect­ed mobil­i­ty and restor­ing capa­bil­i­ty that was lost by hav­ing added armor to the Humvee. 

“We came out of that with an indus­tri­al base that had learned a lot and had ben­e­fit­ed from a round of com­pet­i­tive pro­to­typ­ing,” he said. Hav­ing built pro­to­types, he said, indus­try learned key capa­bil­i­ties of the vehi­cle and also learned of the chal­lenges of devel­op­ing the JLTV. “They came out a whole lot bet­ter pre­pared to make the adjust­ments and require­ments nec­es­sary to end up with the pro­gram that we have an RFP out on the street for today.” 

HUMVEE WAY AHEAD

The lat­est bud­get pro­pos­al has not pro­vid­ed fund­ing for the “Mod­ern­ized Expand­ed Capa­bil­i­ty Vehi­cle” pro­gram, or MECV pro­gram. The MECV pro­gram was to mod­ern­ize the Humvee. 

Fahey said, how­ev­er, that the Humvee is still suit­able to do its mis­sion — many of those mis­sions inside the Unit­ed States. There will be a “sus­tain­ment pro­gram for the HUMVEE fleet for the fore­see­able future,” he said, that includes less a of a focus on sur­viv­abil­i­ty of the Humvee fleet, and more on cost effec­tive­ness and fuel effi­cien­cy. “We’re going to be sus­tain­ing that fleet for quite a while, there will be times in its life it has to go back to the depots for some kind of reset.” 

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Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle pro­to­types
Army offi­cials say indus­try is ready now to begin devel­op­ing the Joint Light Tac­ti­cal Vehi­cle for the Army. While mul­ti­ple pro­to­type JLTV vehi­cles exist, the Army has yet to choose one as the service’s newest vehicle. 

Source:
U.S. Army 

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