Incumbent Oshkosh Defense falls to AM General in JLTV recompete

The US Army awarded AM General a contract to produce its Joint Light Tactical Vehicle that could be worth up to USD8.66 billion. (US Army)

Newcomer AM General beat out Oshkosh Defense to manufacture the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) for US armed forces in a deal that could be worth up to USD8.66 billion over 10 years, US Army programme officials said.

Following a competition between the incumbent and AM General, the army selected the latter for a contract for up to 20,000 vehicles and up to 10,000 JLTV-Trailers (JLTV-Ts) for joint and Foreign Military Sales (FMS) in the next five years with options for additional orders in the following five years. AM General's initial production contract is worth USD290 million, according to the Pentagon.

The service had picked Oshkosh Defense for the initial JLTV contract in 2015, and then ordered the A1 and A2 designs' tactical data packages (TDPs) for the vehicle, as part of an overall cost-saving strategy, US Army Brigadier General Samuel Peterson, Program Executive Officer for Combat Support and Combat Service Support (PEO CS&CSS), said in a 9 February statement.

Since the military owns the rights to the JLTV's data package, the army can continue competing the programme to keep prices low when updating future vehicles, he said.

“These government-held data rights permitted the programme to compete this follow-on production contract with much better control of the production configuration and cost,” Brig Gen Peterson said.