By Ann Roosevelt
With a series of contract awards, BAE Systems‘ total award value for the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) to date in 2008 is $3.7 billion.
This month, the Army awarded BAE a $1.6 billion contract to build another 10,000 Long Term Armor Strategy (LTAS) FMTVs and trailers for 2009 and 2010–the third for LTAS FMTV this year. Earlier, two contracts totaling close to $2.1 billion for 10,000 vehicles and program support.
“This award will boost FMTV production to record rates,” Chris Chambers, vice president of Medium/Heavy Vehicles for BAE in Sealy, Texas, said.
Effectively, the current multiyear contract ended in October, Chambers told Defense Daily in an interview. The government did not issue a recompetition swiftly, so it issued a bridge contract.
“Effectively that bridge contract was a sole source to us for production in 2009 and 2010 and concurrently [the government] is due to put out an RFP then for the follow on production award, which would see a company coming into full rate production at the back end of 2010- 2011.”
The bridge contract consists of two years: the base year put BAE on contract early, undefinitized, for three quarters of the money and more recently tipped it up to the full contract value for the base year, which is about $2.2 billion, Chambers said.
The government also added another $1.6 billion for part of the option year, the 2010 production.
The funds are based on about 8,000 trucks and 2,000 trailers in the base year. For the option year BAE Systems has about 6,500 trucks on contract.
“All this is happening concurrently with the Army finalizing the ‘Grow the Army’ initiative, which was to allow for their rotation model, which they call the ARFORGEN model, to work and also we have the reserves and National Guard, who are also saying it’s time we changed our 40-year-old trucks as quick as we can,” he said.
While many think the truck numbers are because of the war, it has not been the principal driver of buying more FMTVs, he said. “The principal driver has been “grow the Army.” Then the additional driver with the global war on terror funding, which we’re just now kicking into is the introduction of the long term armor strategy.”
From April onwards, only Long Term Armor Strategy (LTAS) FMTV trucks, actually known as the A1P2s, will be built. This is the Army’s move to make all tactical wheeled vehicles capable of having armor fitted to it easily.
“We are working very hard right now to ramp up from our current numbers to the numbers required for this increased volume,” Chambers said. “That will get to 840 vehicles a month. We are introducing that new A1P2 to the production line right now. We’re gradually ramping up the quantities of that configuration so that by the end of April all vehicles will be A1P2.”
There are already armored cabs on FMTVs, called the Low Signature Armored Cab, Chambers said. About 5,000 of those are deployed today.
LTAS for the cab is the strategy that brought in an A-Kit, B-Kit, he said. The A-Kit allows armor to be easily added, and the B-Kit is the armor itself.
“Effectively from April next year, all FMTVs apart from the fact they will look different, all of them will have the ability to be easily armored to a high level of protection,” Chambers said. “The armor pack arrives, very much like an IKEA flat pack, with all the tools required, then they get fitted in the field.”
The armor is bolted on, and some lifting equipment is needed because items such as the ballistic windshield at that level of protection are heavy.
“We had the challenge that we had to make the A-Kit version of the truck legislatively comply for road use,” Chambers said. While complying with road regulations, the vehicle still had to be able to be easily armored to levels of protection that are at least equal to a lot of the armored vehicles that are out there today.
This does not mean that every FMTV will reach the LTAS standard immediately. For battle-damaged vehicles, under the Army’s own reset regulations, reset is limited to less than 75 percent of the value of a new vehicle.
Chambers says, “My guess is that there’s going to be a period of time that the current standard of vehicle will be reset back to its original soft cab version, unless the Army takes the view to recapitalize those vehicles. Then we would upgrade those vehicles to the latest standards.”
The contracts to produce about 10,000 vehicles in 2009 and another 10,000 in 2010 will expand the numbers of FMTV to about 60,000, Chambers said. The Army’s original requirement was just over 80,000 vehicles, he said.
There is international interest in the vehicles, particularly from Canada and Australia in the new FMTV version, because they involved in the same theaters of operation and suffer from the same threat.
The adaptability of the vehicle is part of the driver for the U.S. decision and international interest, Chambers said. “Once you put the armor on, not only do you not have to buy armor kits for every single vehicle because you can change them around, but you can also run your vehicles in the most economical way by not having them always having to carry all the weight of the armor.”
There will be no training changes from the new FMTV A1 P2. BAE has kept the truck handling and internal layout the same. “The only difference, which I don’t think we’ll get any complaints about, is that every vehicle will have air conditioning fitted,” he said.
Additionally, with armor bolted on, several tons more are added to the front of the vehicle.
“FMTV is the most reliable vehicle in the Army’s fleet and we don’t want to give up that reputation,” he said. The system was purposely designed to be able to cope with the worst case scenario: when all the armor is bolted on amd the gunner protection kit is used as well.
BAE is still building 16 variants of the FMTV system.
FMTV production is done in Sealy, where some 2,500 people work. “In my opinion doing a fantastic job for our armed services,” Chambers said. “We are almost wholly devoted and certainly for the next couple of years to producing for the United States Army at record levels of production.”