JLTV Program Could Serve as Acquisition Model.

• Author: Harper, Jon

The Pentagon's joint light tactical vehicle program is viewed as a potential model for future acquisition efforts, as interest in the truck grows at home and abroad.

The platform, known as the JLTV, is an Army-Marine Corps effort to replace a major portion of the services' Humvee fleets. It was designed to offer troops greater protection than legacy trucks while providing more mobility than the up-armored Humvees and mine resistant, ambush-protected vehicles that were widely used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"JLTV better balances those requirements so that the joint force commander can make decisions based on where he needs to maneuver people--not based on the limitations of his wheeled vehicle fleet," Army Col. Shane Fullmer, joint project manager for JLTV, said in June during a media day at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.

Affordability has been a key driver, he said. "You can achieve a lot of good performance at a very high cost. But the cost has to be affordable so that both the Marine Corps and the Army can afford a sufficient number of vehicles." The services plan to buy about 55,000 of them.

The trucks, which are being built by Oshkosh Defense, will not exceed the original cost target of $250,000 per unit in fiscal year 2011 dollars, Fullmer said.

More than 200 trucks have already been delivered. The president's fiscal year 2018 budget requested $1.14 billion to procure 2,777 more.

A full-rate production decision is slated for early fiscal year 2019, and initial operating capability is expected in the first quarter of fiscal year 2020, according to the JLTV joint program office.

The previously planned IOC date was pushed back several months. But this was primarily due to program disruption resulting from a contract award protest, according to a Congressional Research Service report published in May titled, "Joint Light Tactical Vehicle: Background and Issues for Congress."

The JLTV program is widely seen as a major acquisition success story.

"There's actually no reason to dislike the program today," said James Hasik, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

"I haven't noticed yet any meaningful cost overruns on JLTV. I think with fixed-price contracts--as they have--you're not going to get them. From what I can tell it is a great deal.... It does basically exactly what it's supposed to do and it's a pretty reasonable price," he added.

The Army has been under pressure to get JLTV acquisition right, he said. From the mid-1990s to 2010, the Defense Department spent more than $32 billion on Army programs that were eventually canceled. High-profile examples include the Future Combat Systems network of vehicles, the Comanche helicopter and the Crusader artillery system.

"The Army in particular has had quite a few fiascos frankly," Hasik said.

The most notable was the FCS project, which was canceled in 2009 after the service spent $19 billion on systems design. Shifting...