Army, Marines to acquire 50,000 new trucks to replace humvees.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold
• Position: TACTICAL VEHICLES - Cover story

A fistful of defense companies will be vying to win a contract to develop a replacement for the humvee--the Army and Marine Corps' light, all-terrain truck.

Later this year, the Marine Corps and the Army will seek industry bids for the so-called "family of joint light tactical vehicles," The target date for introducing the new vehicle is 2012, said Lt Col. Ben Garza, project manager.

The Army initially plans to buy 392 vehicles for tests, and eventually could begin to acquire as many as 4,291 per year to equip seven brigades annually. The Army estimates it will need 38,421 JLTV vehicles through 2020.

The Marine Corps projects buys of up to 14,150 vehicles through 2020.

Since production began in 1984, AM General of South Bend, Ind., has manufactured more than 190,000 humvees--or high mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicles. During the fighting in Iraq, the vehicle has aged faster than expected. The humvee's peacetime service life is 14 years, but in combat it drops to five years.

In addition, emergency measures to protect humvees against roadside bombs in Iraq, such as bolt-on steel armor, have wreaked havoc on the vehicles' suspensions and engines. Improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have destroyed or disabled large numbers of humvees and killed or wounded many of their occupants.

Almost four years after the invasion, nearly all of the tactical vehicles in U.S. Central Command have at least some form of armor protection. But the additional weight diminishes the vehicles' payload and mobility.

The Office of Naval Research--acting for the services--last fall awarded contracts of $500,000 to each of five contractors to come up with conceptual designs and mockups of the vehicles. The companies are AM General, General Dynamics Land Systems, BAE Systems Land and Armament Group, Oshkosh Truck Corp., and Textron Systems Marine & Land Division.

Another firm, Lockheed Martin Systems Integration--which was not asked to contribute a conceptual design and mockup--nevertheless has announced that it has teamed with Armor Holdings Inc., to make a bid.

Lockheed Martin has little experience making trucks, but in 2006, it won a $9 million contract to build a technology demonstration vehicle for the second phase of the Army's future tactical truck system advanced concept technology demonstration.

For the joint light tactical vehicle project, Lockheed Martin plans to serve as the prime contractor, said Kathryn Hasse, the company's tactical wheeled-vehicles...