Light trucks are the most common type of vehicle operated by U.S. ground forces. The Army alone has over 100,000—mainly High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles better known as Humvees, descended from the ubiquitous jeep of World War Two fame. But Humvees proved inadequate for coping with the challenges of “asymmetric” warfare in places like Iraq, so now the joint force is beginning to deploy something fundamentally different.
The new system is called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle or JLTV, and it is destined to redefine what military mobility means on or near future battlefields. The basic operating principle behind its design is that military planners can’t predict where the enemy will be or what it will do in modern warfare, therefore the vehicles transporting U.S. troops must provide high speed, comprehensive protection, resilient networking and diverse warfighting options.
Oshkosh Corporation (a contributor to my think tank) was selected to build JLTV for the Army, Marine Corps and special operations forces in 2015, and over 11,000 of the vehicles have been ordered. On Thursday, the Army gave Oshkosh the green light to begin full rate production. The Army plans to buy 49,000, the Marine Corps would like 9,000, and there is a high likelihood that eventually many more will be produced for U.S. and allied forces. That would mean over $50 billion in revenues for Oshkosh, which is currently the sole supplier of trucks to the joint force.
Oshkosh didn’t always enjoy this status. It spent most of its history as a purely commercial manufacturer of specialty trucks. But the reputation of its products for reliability and economy eventually attracted the military, and its offering in the JLTV competition was selected partly because it was able to operate six times longer between breakdowns than the next closest rival. In an era when the differences in capabilities between competing military systems often seem modest, the superior reliability of the Oshkosh product was hard to ignore.
A version of Oshkosh’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicle equipped with a 50-caliber machine gun.
Wikipedia
But reliability is just the beginning of what JLTV offers. The vehicle design provides multifaceted protection of occupants without sacrificing speed or maneuverability. One writer who drove it over extremely rough surfaces for Popular Mechanics reported that its crew protection system “wraps the cabin in an armored shell” that he compared to being in a vault, but then went on to observe that “JLTV floats over the terrain like a Baja trophy truck.”
In a business where planners are accustomed to thinking of mobility, reliability, protection and habitability as features that must be traded off against each other in the design process, JLTV is a true breakthrough. Oshkosh’s intelligent suspension and interior features make riding in the vehicle much more comfortable than any previous light military truck. The suspension can even lower overall vehicle height so that JLTV is more easily transported by airlift or surface craft.
The vehicle is so ruggedly constructed that it will largely negate the threat posed by improvised explosive devices in future conflicts. In addition to the aforementioned armor, the underside of JLTV is designed to channel blast effects away from the vehicle; fuel tanks are outside the cabin and shielded against incoming fire; interior fire suppression equipment is automated; and there are multiple points of egress that can be accessed by occupants within seconds. Oshkosh says that its design approach to force protection, which is called Core1080, “has been proven on multiple vehicle platforms and credited for saving thousands of troops’ lives over the past decade.”
That reference is a reminder that Oshkosh won contracts during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to build heavily protected trucks for U.S. forces that could withstand improvised landmines and ambushes. The contracts came at a fortuitous time for the company, which had seen its commercial sales wither and share price fall to $4 as a result of the sub-prime crisis that tanked the entire U.S. economy. As its heavily armored vehicles helped warfighters maneuver through the treacherous streets of Baghdad, revenues from military contracts enabled Oshkosh to survive the worst market conditions in two generations.
The company’s share price recovered nicely and last year briefly topped $100, but commercial vehicle production in America is no joyride. In the most recent six-month period, sales of Oshkosh’s defense unit delivered 25% of corporate revenue, providing a counter-cyclical underpinning to the company’s performance. Like Boeing, another iconic U.S. manufacturer, Oshkosh has learned that having a major presence in commercial, civil and military markets can smooth out results over time. The ValueLine investment survey cites diverse end markets as one reason Oshkosh “holds wide total return potential” through 2022-2024.
But the big dividend of JLTV for America’s military is measured in lives, not dollars. Oshkosh has produced a safe and efficient way of traversing the most hostile territory in wartime, and the versatility of the vehicle suggests it will be adapted to many different missions. Sydney Freedberg noted in a recent Breaking Defense story that the company has displayed “at least” seven variants of the vehicle above and beyond its baseline design configurations for everything from air defense to anti-tank warfare to rescue of wounded troops.
There has recently been some discussion within the Army of foregoing upgrades to its Chinook helicopter that would ease the challenge of lifting JLTV between points, but insiders are betting that Congress will fund the upgrades. Like the headquarters of Oshkosh’s biggest business unit, the plant where the helicopters are built is located in Pennsylvania, which will be a key battleground state in the 2020 election. The same is true of Oshkosh’s home state of Wisconsin, where the company’s defense unit is headquartered. It helps to have politics on your side when you are selling to the government.
However, the operational merits of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle seem more than sufficient to keep the program on track, regardless of political considerations. JLTV is by far the safest, most reliable, most versatile light military truck ever built. If you haven’t heard much about it in the media, that’s only because nothing has gone wrong. The program is progressing steadily, and looks destined to be a big success for its manufacturer—not to mention the troops who rely on it.
