The Marine Corps’ Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program has reached initial operational capability (IOC) a year ahead of schedule, officials said Monday.
The force’s newest tactical vehicles have been fully fielded fielded to the Marine Corps’ schoolhouses as well as an infantry battalion, with plans to deliver the Oshkosh [OSK]-built JLTVs to the I and III Marine Expeditionary Forces before the end of September.
“IOC is more than just saying that the schoolhouses and an infantry battalion all have their trucks,” Eugene Morin, PEO Land Systems’ product manager for JLTV, said in a statement. “All of the tools and parts required to support the system need to be in place, the units must have had received sufficient training and each unit commander needs to declare that he is combat-ready.”
Marine Corps officials had set June 2020 as the projected IOC date, noting that the accelerated timeline was due to “detailed program scheduling, planning and, most importantly, teamwork with stakeholders across the enterprise.”
“Oshkosh enjoys a tremendous working relationship with the United States Marine Corps, and working together we achieved this milestone through hard work, dedication, and a focus on bringing the Warfighter a vehicle that is truly leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor in terms of capability and performance,” George Mansfield, Oshkosh Defense’s vice president for joint programs, told Defense Daily. “In addition to the vehicles, Oshkosh provided operator and maintainer training and initial spare parts packages to ensure a combat ready capability. We couldn’t be more proud.”
The JLTV program is led out of the Army, which recently approved the effort for full-rate production (Defense Daily, June 21).
“We’ll easily still have these assets somewhere in the DoD in the year 2100. Welcome to the start of many generations of JLTVs,” Andrew Rodgers, the program manager for Light Tactical Vehicles, said in a statement.
Oshkosh beat out AM General, the maker of the Army and Marine Corps’ Humvees, to win the JLTV competition in 2015 with a $6.7 billion low-rate production contract for 17,000 vehicles.
The Marine Corps has increased its overall acquisition objective for JLTVs from 5,500 to 9,901 vehicles, Mansfield previously told Defense Daily. March 14).
Mansfield said Marine Corps has doubled maintainer training for the JLTV, the same decision the Army made to address earlier concerns soldiers experienced while working on fixes to the vehicles during the evaluation period (Defense Daily, February 4).
The Army is slated to reach IOC for its JLTVs in the second quarter of FY ’20, according to Mansfield.