From the outside, Textron’s [TXT] survivable combat tactical vehicle (SCTV) looks almost identical to a Humvee, but the truck has been outfitted with a series of upgrades that give it protection on par, if not better than the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicle.
Though the Army has chosen its Humvee successor in the Oshkosh [OSK] Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, there are hundreds of thousands of Humvees still in operation worldwide and companies like Textron and original Humvee manufacturer AM General are banking on maintenance and upgrade contracts to sustain their production lines.
The market to upgrade Humvees is vibrant even though the Army and Marine Corps have deemed them unworthy of fighting on battlefields where enemies deploy improvised explosive devises that shredded their thin skins in the early days of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. JLTV loser AM General demonstrated this by announcing a $420 million contract to build ambulance configured Humvees just days after Oshkosh took the prize to build nearly 550,000 JLTVs.
AM General announced this week it had secured another $42 million worth of contracts for new vehicles and upgrades to existing fleets in Afghanistan, Tunisia, Israel Turkey, Kenya and Lebanon. Based on those and future maintenance contracts, the original Humvee manufacturer declined to protest the JLTV award to Oshkosh to focus on Humvee business. The Lockheed Martin [LMT] – BAE Systems team that also competed for JLTV has launched a protest that should be decided just before Christmas.
Textron has its sights set on the 300,000 or so Humvees currently in operation worldwide. About 160,000 of those trucks are in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps inventories and though those services are dead set on procuring the JLTV, they “are very aware of the SCTV product,” Jonathan Dalrymple, Textron’s vice president of business development, told Defense Daily.
The company is looking outside U.S. borders to market the vehicle upgrade kits. Reports indicate Ukraine is interested in the kits to fortify its Humvee fleet in preparation for a possible war with Russia. Textron has identified 25 countries it said are prime candidates for the SCTV kits, namely ones that are in or near a current conflict, that have sizable Humvee fleets and that have the budgets and desire to support upgrades, Dalrymple said.
“We believe there are 10,000 vehicles we can get in the next five years,” he said.
The SCTV shares about 70 percent commonality with a legacy Humvee. Textron cuts out the personnel compartment and drops in a new, V-hulled steel prefabricated crew capsule that has padded ceiling, walls and doors and has no sharp edges. It also had blast-attenuating seats to further protect occupants from roadside bombs.
“This is a survivability product,” “We are above MRAP-levels of protection in a Humvee. It’s above JLTV protection levels,” Dalrymple said.
SCTV takes a standard Humvee and retrofits it with five primary kits to first improve crew protection and then upgrade performance to compensate for the added weight and size of the aftermarket armor. Aside from the protected crew compartment, the vehicle is lifted on new suspension to create space from the roadway and potential blast events. The vehicle is then “repowered” to compensate for the added weight, though it does not require an entirely new engine, Dalrymple said.
Then the brakes are replaced, also to compensate for the increased weight and “power pack” upgrades. The crew compartment also removes the wall separating the front and back seats in a legacy Humvee, as well as moves the battery and fuel tank away from the crew compartment.
For comfort’s sake, the crew capsule is equipped with a heavy duty air conditioner, which is not a feature on standard issue Humvees.
Dalrymple said Textron is committed to performing much of the upgrade work–which is a depot level overhaul, but takes weeks instead of months for a traditional rebuild–in partnership with indigenous companies and workers.
“It provides them with jobs and they then become experts in maintenance, which could lead to indigenous manufacturing for future sales of vehicles that are made in country for export,” he said.