US Army, Marines Join Up To Save JLTV

source US Army

Oct 11, 2011 By Andrea Shalal-Esa/Reuters AviationWeek.com

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army says it has joined with the Marine Corps to convince Senate appropriators to reverse their decision to terminate a multibillion-dollar program to replace at least 20,000 Humvees.

Army Chief of Staff General Raymond Odierno said Army and Marine Corps officials are in lock-step on the need to maintain the new acquisition program and are meeting with Senate lawmakers to try to get them to reverse their decision.

“It’s a program that both the Army and Marines want to move forward together with. They’re locked arm in arm,” he said at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference.

The new acquisition program would develop a new vehicle to replace the Humvee, which is made by AM General and BAE Systems.

The Senate Defense Appropriations subcommittee last month froze the Pentagon’s fiscal 2012 base budget at $513 billion, $26 billion less than President Barack Obama’s request and down $20 billion from the House of Representatives’ plan.

As part of that decision, the panel killed the Army’s multibillion-dollar Joint Light Tactical Vehicle program, citing what it called the program’s “excessive cost growth and constantly changing requirements.”

The fate of the program—one of very few new Army acquisition programs—is being closely watched by BAE, Navistar International, General Dynamics, AM General and Lockheed Martin, which have been working on vehicle designs for the Army.

“Defense budgets are shifting and the circumstances demand that industry anticipate what our warfighters need,” said Archie Massicotte, president of Navistar Defense, which unveiled a new light tactical vehicle at the Army conference that it said was ready for production now and filled the gaps between the Humvees and the JLTV designs still in work.

Many experts expect the JLTV program—estimated by the Congressional Research Service to cost between $10 billion to $70 billion—to be ended as part of the overall drive to cut defense spending in coming years.

The Senate panel’s move must still be confirmed during budget negotiations with the House.

The military services have tried to present a unified front as they struggle to find $489 billion in budget savings over the next 10 years, but the total could grow by up to $600 billion more if lawmakers fail to find $1.2 trillion in budget cuts by the end of the year.

At the same time, lawmakers are working to complete a budget for the fiscal 2012 budget year, which began Oct. 1.

Odierno told reporters that Army Vice Chief of Staff General Peter Chiarelli and Marine Corps Assistant Commandant Lieutenant General Joseph Dunford had been working closely together since the Senate panel’s decision. They were trying to explain a more “creative” acquisition approach to lawmakers.

Army Secretary John McHugh said the Senate panel acted before the Army and Marine Corps reached a common understanding of how to proceed on the program.

The Army earlier this month published rules for the next phase of the program, which was initially intended to replace the heavily used Humvee while providing the safety of much heavier mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles.

Three industry teams—BAE Systems and Navistar; General Dynamics and AM General; and Lockheed Martin and BAE—have developed designs for the new vehicles.

The next phase of the competition is open to all parties, not just those three industry teams, and the Army has set an aggressive cost target of between $230,000 and $270,000 per vehicle, depending on the variant.

For years, Marine Corps officials chafed at the weight of the vehicles, saying unless the weight of proposed vehicles came down sharply they would be too heavy to efficiently transport to the battlefield, but Odierno said the two services had agreed on several innovative and creative changes.

The House and Senate Armed Services committees have also acted to cut $50 million from the requested $172 million fiscal 2012 budget for the program. Spending on the program would swell in coming years as the program begins production, just the defense budget comes under further pressure.