By Ann Roosevelt
Earlier this month, Oshkosh Corp.’s [OSK] Oshkosh Defense unit submitted its final proposal revisions for the Army’s potential five-year multi-billion Family of Medium Tactical Trucks (FMTV) competitive rebuy program for an estimated 23,000 vehicles and trailers, with proposals remaining valid until the end of October.
BAE Systems is the incumbent on the program.
“We felt we were very competitive because not only do we build the other medium truck [for the Marines] but we’re the only ones who build medium and heavy trucks and now have expanded our portfolio with the light-to-medium weight truck with the M-ATV, so we felt we had a unique production approach that allows us to do lots of different variants very efficient manufacturing processes that will be a very cost-effective approach for the customer,” Andy Hove, Oshkosh Corporation executive vice president and president, Defense, told Defense Daily in an interview.
The government owns the data package for the FMTV and is specifically looking for a company that can build to the specifications.
Oshkosh Corp. invested its own money to help increase customer confidence in their proposal. For example in designing and producing a long-term armor strategy (LTAS)-compliant FMTV cab. The company has also engineered vehicle components and bought tooling. Such actions would reduce risk.
“In some of those areas we knew were areas of key concern we made some prudent investments to demonstrate not only what we put on paper but in real hard material that we could do what we said we could,” Hove said.
For the purposes of evaluation, the company made available a prototype for them to examine, he said. The Army follows a formal evaluation process, so there is no casual feedback. “Their feedback will ultimately be whether we win the award or not,” he said.
Oshkosh Defense is very competitive in also using about 90 percent of the same suppliers as the FMTV incumbent, he said.
“Most of those suppliers are suppliers that we already work with, we have a relationship with, either on our other military programs or commercial programs,” he said. “We’re able to leverage those relationships to execute this program as well.”
In the government’s outline of a broad range of criteria it will use to make their decision, and most important is the price, and the evaluation of the capability to build the vehicles, innovation is a criteria, but less important.
Part of the Oshkosh proposal does include innovation and cutting edge technology for trucks. For example, hybrid-electric drive for military-class trucks, the ability to do off-road vehicle power and military grade power on military trucks, and its TAK-4 independent suspension system, used on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for Afghanistan and on the Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacements.
“The actual implementation of those or how those are priced right now are not part of the evaluation criteria other than to say down the road if the Army wants to do that, we are capable of doing that,” Hove said. “I think they’ve been very careful to get an apples to apples comparison to what they have right now.”
The Oshkosh Corp. production line also is set up to deal with an influx of building FMTV trucks.
The centerpiece of our strategy at Oshkosh is to be able to systematically deal with that high variability that you need to execute a military truck programs so that we can essentially build the trucks in the order that the customer wants to receive them,” Hove said. “On any given day we’re building not only different trucks in our facilities but different variants of different trucks,” he said. “For example on our production line are cargo variants of the [Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck] HEMTT and fuel truck variants of the HEMTT, and cargo truck variants of our MTVR and wrecker variants of out MTVR that all go down the line on the same day.”
Hove said the company has a “rock solid” history of delivering a quality product on time and within the cost parameters.
There are unique attributes to running a military truck program that few companies in the world can do, Hove said. “We have managed the complexity of not just of building the trucks but managing the whole program, that we’re able to provide capability across the entire life cycle,” from design through in-theater support.