Long road remains for JLTV despite technology's maturity.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew

In November, the Army-Marine Corps' Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program will be seven years old.

Time flies when a major military acquisition program is involved.

The deliberate pace of the program--which is not anticipated to deliver a next-generation replacement for the Humvee until 2015--is in stark contrast to the rapid fielding of the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles that manufacturers produced in a period counted in months, rather than years.

Responding to the scourge of roadside bombs in Iraq, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates asked industry in 2007 to design, develop and manufacture a new class of vehicles. Skipping traditional acquisition practices, truck makers responded and delivered the life-saving MRAPs within 27 months.

Critics of the way the Pentagon acquires hardware have asked why the MRAP process can't be repeated. Meanwhile, in two other high-profile programs, the Armed Aerial Scout helicopter and the Special Operations Forces Ground Mobility Vehicle, vendors are building prototypes they believe will fit all the requirements and bringing them ready made to the customers. All this is bring done with the companies' own dollars, while using off-the-shelf components.

When asked if they could build a JLTV in the same amount of time that it took to produce the MRAP--in a similar scenario where the military needed them urgently--executives from three truck manufacturers said unequivocally, "yes."

"Our vehicle is absolutely ready to go into production right now," John Bryant, vice president and general manager of joint programs for Oshkosh Defense, said confidently.

Oshkosh is one of three vendors--along with a Lockheed Martin-BAE Systems team and Humvee manufacturer AM General--that are participating in an engineering, manufacturing and development phase that will demand that they produce 22 JLTV prototypes in a year.

Bryant said he could not speak for the other competitors, but insisted that Oshkosh could skip the rest of the 27-month EMD phase and flip the switch on the assembly line today.

"I will defer to our warfighting customer on why he built the strategy the way he did, but the strategy for the JLTV program is a very low-risk [one]," he said.

From November 2006, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff's Joint Requirements Oversight Council green-lighted the program to low-rate initial production in 2015 is about nine years. During the first few years, the program hit snags that had nothing to do with the maturity of the technology. Disagreements between the Marine Corps and Army and with their Defense Department overseers centering on requirements and costs caused some delays, along with protests from vendors who lost out on the first phase of development. All along, manufacturers were increasing their knowledge of how to build bomb-protected trucks.

Kathryn Hasse, director of the Lockheed Martin JLTV team, said that the first year of the 27-month EMD phase essentially mimics a rapid acquisition program.

"We are delivering 22 prototype...