Second Life For Humvees
Posted: Thu Jun 30, 2011 4:15 pm
By Paul McLeary
Washington
June 30, 2011
The U.S. Army’s wheeled tactical and ground combat vehicle fleet is an embarrassment of riches. There is the iconic HMMWV—the High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee—up-armored Humvees, Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles, MRAP All-Terrain Vehicles (M-ATV), Stryker armored fighting vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles and various armored security vehicles.
By the end of the decade the service plans to add two wheeled vehicles to the mix: the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), and spend hundreds of millions rebuilding—the Army refers to it as a “recap”—at least 60,000 Humvees from the frame up. This will be accomplished simultaneously with the culling of 15% of its 260,000 trucks by fiscal 2017, Army planning documents say. This would reduce the yearly tactical wheeled vehicle bill to $2.5 billion from $4.4 billion. It’s a complicated scenario compounded by the uncertain future of the GCV and JLTV, platforms that face technology hurdles as well as skepticism over their utility.
The Army has been fighting to start the HMMWV recap program for some time, but was blocked by Congress in 2010 from redirecting money to the initiative from funds set aside to buy Humvees. The plan the Army unveiled in its fiscal 2012 budget for upcoming years calls for recapping some 3,000 up-armored Humvees a year starting in fiscal 2013, with the goal of eventually upgrading more than 68,000 vehicles. It is requesting $161 million in fiscal 2012 for the program, a number that is slated to stay steady through fiscal 2016.
In April, the Army released its second request for information (RFI) for armoring, upgrading and refitting 60,000 up-armored HMMWVs from its fleet of 150,000 AM General-made vehicles. In the document, the Army said it is thinking bigger, with “the total potential quantity over the next 20 years [of] approximately 100,000 vehicles.” The program’s protection and mobility goals push the envelope of the possible in vehicle design, demanding near-MRAP levels of protection, while giving the vehicle back its original mobility and decreasing the weight of the current up-armored version. Mike Ivy, senior vice president and general manager for Army programs at truck maker Oshkosh Corp., which is bidding on the work, admits that the requirements are “challenging us . . . but I suspect all of industry is challenged” in trying to find the right mix of capabilities to meet the Army’s needs.
Chris Berman, owner of Granite Tactical, which has teamed with Textron on a recap bid, says that while his design is extremely maneuverable, the weight difference between the original 7,500-lb. Humvee and the recap, which will be 13,000-16,000 lb., is too great. “You’re never going to get [the new weight] of a kitted vehicle to go the same place that you’re going to get a 7,000-lb. vehicle going,” he says.
Still, Oshkosh and Textron/Granite, along with competitors AM General and BAE Systems, are giving it a shot.
Setting its recap price limit at $180,000 per vehicle, the Army is planning on spending more than three times what an unarmored Humvee costs to purchase. The payoff comes in the extra decades the program buys—the service projects using the upgraded vehicles well past 2030.
It hasn’t been an easy road for the Humvee. Sent to Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago with thin-skin armor, the vehicles were chewed up by roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, necessitating an on-the-fly up-armoring program that added weight while decreasing performance and maneuverability, stressing the suspension system almost to its breaking point and increasing fuel consumption.
It won’t be cheap to recap tens of thousands of vehicles. But the JLTV program, which is pegged as the replacement for up to 50,000 Humvees, is expected to cost at least $300,000 per vehicle, making the recap much less expensive. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report crunched numbers and came up with estimates. The base system cost for the M-ATV is $445,000, $186,000 for an up-armored HMMWV and $306,000–332,000 for the JLTV. (In fact, a Rand Corp. study released in April warned that the price for the JLTV could top $400,000.)
These costs may change, depending on the number of vehicles involved and the length and size of the contracts awarded. Col. David Bassett, the Army’s project manager for tactical vehicles, says the Humvee recap is going to be a long-term project that will continuously come up for competition. “The recap is not a forever program,” he told an industry audience at a tactical vehicles summit in Washington in April. The Army wants to re-compete the contract every five years, he added, warning industry members in the audience that “you need to be on your game.”
It’s not only the Army that wants to overhaul its HMMWV fleet. In March, the Marine Corps submitted its initial plan for a Humvee recap program to the Senate Armed Services Committee, following up on a request last year. The committee’s fiscal 2010 report confirmed its support for “the Army and Marine Corps plans to initiate a selective HMMWV recapitalization program that prudently resets, rebuilds and extends the life” of the vehicles.
At the same time as it submitted its analysis to the Senate, the Marine Corps released an RFI to industry, which is expected to be followed by a formal request for proposals, perhaps this month.
Like the Army, the Marines Corps has been trying to upgrade its Humvee fleet for years, with little success. An attempt to install Frag Kit 4 armor to the vehicle’s underbelly failed in 2007, followed by another disappointment in 2010 when it scuttled a program to put new armored capsules on the vehicles. An initiative the service was exploring with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for a new type of armor also fell through. The latest plan is to open the program to industry competition for a recap of 3,400 vehicles, with the requirement that they be capable of the same sea and air transport as the current fleet.
Ivy says Oshkosh is throwing its hat in the ring for the Army and Marine programs because it is anxious to establish a presence in the light vehicle market, as it has in the medium and heavy markets with, respectively, the M-ATV and the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck. The company has built one prototype for the Army, and for the Marine Corps has taken a standard Humvee and installed a version of its TAK-4 suspension used on the M-ATV in Afghanistan. The service has put “some test miles on it,” he adds.
For now, industry is waiting to see if the Army and Marines come together on the project instead of working on separate recap programs. A joint program would entail concessions from both services on weight, survivability and perhaps mobility. That said, a joint program would be more cost-effective by providing economies of scale.
In a meeting with reporters in May, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli spoke to the issue. Given President Barack Obama’s request for $400 billion in defense budget cuts in coming years, “the services are working together to look at programs, redundancies and duplications,” he said. While redundancies aren’t always a bad thing, Chiarelli added, the Pentagon needs to “take a look across the services to see if we have duplications, and if we can play to the strength of one service.” In fact, the services have already come together in a series of what one industry official calls “technology summits” to hammer out common requirements.
One team that says it’s ready to go is Textron and Granite Tactical, which placed a recap test model with the Marines in 2009, and is putting around 100-200 mi./per day on its own test vehicles, according to Berman, a former Navy SEAL who has been working to armor the Humvee since his experiences in Iraq in 2004. “We had a recap solution three years ago,” he says, adding “we’re production-ready.” Berman says the team exceeded JLTV-level protection and matched MRAP Level 1 protection in Marine Corps tests and its own independent testing, all while staying several hundred pounds lighter than a current up-armored Humvee.
A Rand study earlier this year found that the Humvee’s quarter century of service, multiple versions and years at war have thrown the fleet “out of balance in several areas.” The Army National Guard, for example, has a higher percentage of up-armored Humvees than the Army “despite having fewer requirements.” However, the National Guard’s “overall level of modernization trails both the active component and U.S. Army Reserve because of its lower level of modernized unarmored HMMWVs.”
It’s an imbalance that will likely take lots of money, and decades, to undo.
Washington
June 30, 2011
The U.S. Army’s wheeled tactical and ground combat vehicle fleet is an embarrassment of riches. There is the iconic HMMWV—the High-Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee—up-armored Humvees, Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicles, MRAP All-Terrain Vehicles (M-ATV), Stryker armored fighting vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles and various armored security vehicles.
By the end of the decade the service plans to add two wheeled vehicles to the mix: the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), and spend hundreds of millions rebuilding—the Army refers to it as a “recap”—at least 60,000 Humvees from the frame up. This will be accomplished simultaneously with the culling of 15% of its 260,000 trucks by fiscal 2017, Army planning documents say. This would reduce the yearly tactical wheeled vehicle bill to $2.5 billion from $4.4 billion. It’s a complicated scenario compounded by the uncertain future of the GCV and JLTV, platforms that face technology hurdles as well as skepticism over their utility.
The Army has been fighting to start the HMMWV recap program for some time, but was blocked by Congress in 2010 from redirecting money to the initiative from funds set aside to buy Humvees. The plan the Army unveiled in its fiscal 2012 budget for upcoming years calls for recapping some 3,000 up-armored Humvees a year starting in fiscal 2013, with the goal of eventually upgrading more than 68,000 vehicles. It is requesting $161 million in fiscal 2012 for the program, a number that is slated to stay steady through fiscal 2016.
In April, the Army released its second request for information (RFI) for armoring, upgrading and refitting 60,000 up-armored HMMWVs from its fleet of 150,000 AM General-made vehicles. In the document, the Army said it is thinking bigger, with “the total potential quantity over the next 20 years [of] approximately 100,000 vehicles.” The program’s protection and mobility goals push the envelope of the possible in vehicle design, demanding near-MRAP levels of protection, while giving the vehicle back its original mobility and decreasing the weight of the current up-armored version. Mike Ivy, senior vice president and general manager for Army programs at truck maker Oshkosh Corp., which is bidding on the work, admits that the requirements are “challenging us . . . but I suspect all of industry is challenged” in trying to find the right mix of capabilities to meet the Army’s needs.
Chris Berman, owner of Granite Tactical, which has teamed with Textron on a recap bid, says that while his design is extremely maneuverable, the weight difference between the original 7,500-lb. Humvee and the recap, which will be 13,000-16,000 lb., is too great. “You’re never going to get [the new weight] of a kitted vehicle to go the same place that you’re going to get a 7,000-lb. vehicle going,” he says.
Still, Oshkosh and Textron/Granite, along with competitors AM General and BAE Systems, are giving it a shot.
Setting its recap price limit at $180,000 per vehicle, the Army is planning on spending more than three times what an unarmored Humvee costs to purchase. The payoff comes in the extra decades the program buys—the service projects using the upgraded vehicles well past 2030.
It hasn’t been an easy road for the Humvee. Sent to Iraq and Afghanistan a decade ago with thin-skin armor, the vehicles were chewed up by roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades, necessitating an on-the-fly up-armoring program that added weight while decreasing performance and maneuverability, stressing the suspension system almost to its breaking point and increasing fuel consumption.
It won’t be cheap to recap tens of thousands of vehicles. But the JLTV program, which is pegged as the replacement for up to 50,000 Humvees, is expected to cost at least $300,000 per vehicle, making the recap much less expensive. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report crunched numbers and came up with estimates. The base system cost for the M-ATV is $445,000, $186,000 for an up-armored HMMWV and $306,000–332,000 for the JLTV. (In fact, a Rand Corp. study released in April warned that the price for the JLTV could top $400,000.)
These costs may change, depending on the number of vehicles involved and the length and size of the contracts awarded. Col. David Bassett, the Army’s project manager for tactical vehicles, says the Humvee recap is going to be a long-term project that will continuously come up for competition. “The recap is not a forever program,” he told an industry audience at a tactical vehicles summit in Washington in April. The Army wants to re-compete the contract every five years, he added, warning industry members in the audience that “you need to be on your game.”
It’s not only the Army that wants to overhaul its HMMWV fleet. In March, the Marine Corps submitted its initial plan for a Humvee recap program to the Senate Armed Services Committee, following up on a request last year. The committee’s fiscal 2010 report confirmed its support for “the Army and Marine Corps plans to initiate a selective HMMWV recapitalization program that prudently resets, rebuilds and extends the life” of the vehicles.
At the same time as it submitted its analysis to the Senate, the Marine Corps released an RFI to industry, which is expected to be followed by a formal request for proposals, perhaps this month.
Like the Army, the Marines Corps has been trying to upgrade its Humvee fleet for years, with little success. An attempt to install Frag Kit 4 armor to the vehicle’s underbelly failed in 2007, followed by another disappointment in 2010 when it scuttled a program to put new armored capsules on the vehicles. An initiative the service was exploring with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for a new type of armor also fell through. The latest plan is to open the program to industry competition for a recap of 3,400 vehicles, with the requirement that they be capable of the same sea and air transport as the current fleet.
Ivy says Oshkosh is throwing its hat in the ring for the Army and Marine programs because it is anxious to establish a presence in the light vehicle market, as it has in the medium and heavy markets with, respectively, the M-ATV and the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck. The company has built one prototype for the Army, and for the Marine Corps has taken a standard Humvee and installed a version of its TAK-4 suspension used on the M-ATV in Afghanistan. The service has put “some test miles on it,” he adds.
For now, industry is waiting to see if the Army and Marines come together on the project instead of working on separate recap programs. A joint program would entail concessions from both services on weight, survivability and perhaps mobility. That said, a joint program would be more cost-effective by providing economies of scale.
In a meeting with reporters in May, Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Chiarelli spoke to the issue. Given President Barack Obama’s request for $400 billion in defense budget cuts in coming years, “the services are working together to look at programs, redundancies and duplications,” he said. While redundancies aren’t always a bad thing, Chiarelli added, the Pentagon needs to “take a look across the services to see if we have duplications, and if we can play to the strength of one service.” In fact, the services have already come together in a series of what one industry official calls “technology summits” to hammer out common requirements.
One team that says it’s ready to go is Textron and Granite Tactical, which placed a recap test model with the Marines in 2009, and is putting around 100-200 mi./per day on its own test vehicles, according to Berman, a former Navy SEAL who has been working to armor the Humvee since his experiences in Iraq in 2004. “We had a recap solution three years ago,” he says, adding “we’re production-ready.” Berman says the team exceeded JLTV-level protection and matched MRAP Level 1 protection in Marine Corps tests and its own independent testing, all while staying several hundred pounds lighter than a current up-armored Humvee.
A Rand study earlier this year found that the Humvee’s quarter century of service, multiple versions and years at war have thrown the fleet “out of balance in several areas.” The Army National Guard, for example, has a higher percentage of up-armored Humvees than the Army “despite having fewer requirements.” However, the National Guard’s “overall level of modernization trails both the active component and U.S. Army Reserve because of its lower level of modernized unarmored HMMWVs.”
It’s an imbalance that will likely take lots of money, and decades, to undo.