AM General puts JLTV defeat in rearview mirror.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

* AM General is going to be just fine.

Thanks for the concern.

That sums up the attitude of the South Bend, Indiana-based maker of the venerable Humvee in the wake of the hotly contested competition to field a new light tactical wheeled vehicle, which it lost last year to rival Oshkosh Corp.

After the loss, some analysts predicted its owner--billionaire businessman Ron Perelman's diversified holding company, MacAndrews & Forbes Inc.--would sell off the company. That has not come to pass yet.

"We have got great visibility of a deep pipeline of Humvee sales into the future," said Chris Vanslager, the company's executive vice president for defense programs.

Along with sales of new vehicles, the company plans on sustaining and modernizing older models for decades to come. It also has two non-military businesses to keep its plants humming: a subsidiary making purpose-built wheelchair accessible cars and a contract to build station wagons for Mercedes-Benz.

"We're very bullish about where we are at right now," Vanslager said in an interview.

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The joint Army-Marine Corps program's original goal was to field a replacement for the Humvee, which went into service in 1985. For starters, it will be quite some time before the JLTV supplants the Humvee, Vanslager said. It will be in the inventory through at least 2048, and perhaps longer.

"According to the DoD's vehicle strategy, the JLTV does not and will not replace the Humvee. Additionally, the program's acquisition strategy calls for several years of testing before a full fielding decision is made. At that point, it's projected the program will take almost 10 years to complete full fielding," he said.

The JLTV program of record calls for 17,000 units to be delivered in the first five years of the contract. That is in contrast to the 230,000 Humvees that have been fielded globally since 1985. About 160,000 of those are in U.S. forces, he noted.

And the Defense Department continues to be a customer, both domestically and for foreign military sales. Shortly after it lost the JLTV competition, it announced a six-year $428 million contract for up to 3,000 new M997A3 Humvee ambulance vehicles intended for National Guard, Army Reserve and Army domestic disaster relief missions.

Another big contract for new-build Humvees signed in 2015 included $372 million in foreign military sales to Afghanistan, Iraq, Kenya, Lebanon, Ukraine and Tunisia totaling 2,082 vehicles. More recently, the company announced that it had secured $57...