Uncertain path ahead for military truck fleet.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: TACTICAL VEHICLES

With an inventory of 300,000 trucks--a mix of old, new and everything in between--the Army and Marine Corps are trying to decide which ones to keep, and how they will go about fixing or replacing damaged and outdated vehicles.

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The services have struggled over the past several years to predict the quantities and types of vehicles they will need. Forecasts of future buys have been complicated by internal disagreements over how to modernize the fleet of more than 150,000 Army and 25,000 Marine Corps Humvees. Throwing another wrench into the debate is the Defense Department's $36 billion investment in mine-resistant ambush protected trucks. This has been a thorny issue because the military services so far have considered MRAPs niche vehicles. Now they will have to figure out how many of the nearly 20,000 MRAPs that have been acquired thus far will be made part of the official inventory of U.S. tactical wheeled vehicles.

Military officials are weighing options, although there is no question that, under any modernization strategy, light trucks will be the centerpiece. Humvees make up the biggest portion of the tactical wheeled vehicle fleet. Because of their sheer numbers and the potential costs of acquiring new vehicles to replace old ones, Humvees are creating a fix-or-buy-new dilemma for decision makers.

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Industry insiders, as they wait for Army and Marine Corps officials to sort this out, are betting that the big money won't be in new trucks but rather in repairs and upgrades. "Humvee recapitalization probably is the biggest program out there in the near term," said an industry source. The only new vehicle that may be acquired is the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. But industry is not counting on big numbers. Manufacturers were once enthused about JLTV, which started out in 2006 as a program to replace Humvees. JLTV has floundered recently, as the Marine Corps soured on the vehicle for being too heavy. Its estimated price tag of nearly half-a-million dollars per truck has made it all that much more certain that if the services end up buying JLTV, it will be in smaller numbers than industry had hoped.

In deliberations over how to modernize the fleet, the $36 billion already poured into MRAP is the elephant in the room. That equates to almost half the value of the entire $70 billion Army fleet of 266,000 trucks.

Army officials in October leaked to reporters a draft "tactical...