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A team led by Lockheed Martin [LMT] yesterday submitted its engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) design for the Army-Marine Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), a vehicle lighter and more affordable than its offerings for the previous Technology Demonstration phase, officials said.
The proposal “reflects our proven design used in the very successful technology demonstration phase, Scott Greene, vice president, Ground Vehicle Programs for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control said in a briefing for reporters yesterday.
“Our improvements removed hundreds of pounds of weight from our TD design, which was already proven in helicopter lift tests,” Greene said. The company’s vehicles have “more than 160,000 combined testing miles,” and the blast protection matches the protection standards of many existing mine-resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles in theater today.
The team’s proposed vehicle is light enough for helicopter transport, offering the same protection as MRAPs at 30 percent of the weight of those vehicles, he said.
Kathryn Hasse, director of JLTV for Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control said the company did some “optimization” based on their technology demonstration work to meed government affordability targets without compromising their efforts.
For example, they took exotic materials out of the vehicle in favor of less expensive and common materials, and doing such things as simplifying brackets, she said. These efforts took “significant cost” out of the design and leaves the program in a “good position for production.”
Additionally, with teammate BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin us already taking more cost and risk out of production by going through a series of “virtual builds” for the BAE Systems high-volume production line at Sealy, Texas.
All of this was done “without compromising the tremendous vehicle performance we had in technology demonstration,” both officials said. As well, the vehicles passed all transportability and force protection requirements and did it in such a way that the reliability of the vehicle was not compromised.
However, the majority of the vehicle remains basically the same vehicle from TD to EMD phase, Hasse said.
Formed in 2005, the Lockheed Martin JLTV team is stable, Hasse said. Core team members include BAE Systems, complemented by numerous Tier 1 automotive suppliers, including: Cummins Engine [CMI], Allison Transmission [ALSN], Bosch, Meritor Defense [MTOR], Lotus Engineering, L3 Combat Propulsion Systems [LLL] and Vehma International of America.