Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Key Issues USAF depot plan LSM design FLRAA program schedule
Jason Sherman is a reporter for Inside Defense. For more than two decades -- including stints with Defense News and Armed Forces Journal -- he has covered the Pentagon, defense industry, the military budget, weapon system acquisition and defense policy formulation as well as reporting on technology, business, and global arms trade. Jason has traveled to more than 40 countries, studied medieval history at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and lives in Brooklyn.
The Defense Department has assigned the Army's bomb-squad and route clearance vehicle program the highest industrial priority, granting the Medium Mine Protected Vehicle a DX rating to ensure the program receives access to key materials and components that are also in high demand for another DX-rated program -- the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is scheduled to meet Friday afternoon with top Pentagon leaders to review the developing fiscal year 2009 budget request, according to sources involved in constructing the spending plan.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense is examining whether to lasso Army depots into the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle program to assist the Space and Naval Warfare Center in Charleston, SC, with the integration of government-furnished equipment (GFE) into newly manufactured armored trucks.
BAE Systems last month won a mini-competition within the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle program to build bombproof trucks configured as ambulances, a development that appears to guarantee the vendor orders of more than 400 vehicles configured for medical transportation.
While Army officials continue to express a preference for fewer variants of blast-proof trucks, the Pentagon will be hard-pressed to pare back the number of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle vendors next month in what is expected to be the largest bundle of MRAP orders to date, according to a senior Army acquisition official.
Pentagon officials are considering recent reviews of new blast-proof trucks prepared by troops in Iraq that conclude Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles hamper mobility and speed so severely that units are asking to return to their armored humvees, according to a top Defense Department official.
The bulk of the Pentagon's next round of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle orders will be for larger, heavier variants of the armored truck, a dynamic that analysts say could influence how the Defense Department awards an expected $3.4 billion for new vehicles in early December.
In a bid to keep cash flowing to the Pentagon's No. 1 acquisition effort, congressional appropriators today shifted $11.6 billion into the Defense Department's fiscal year 2008 base budget for the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle program, a move intended to support contract awards for 6,500 additional vehicles next month.
Top brass at U.S. Central Command and the Pentagon last week awarded more than half of the 2,400 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles ordered last month to the Army, a move that will more than double the size of the ground service's fleet of the larger category II MRAPs, according to data provided by the Joint Staff.
The Defense Department is wrapping up the testing of new "expedient armor kits" designed to give Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles new layers of protection against the blast effects of armor-piercing roadside bombs.
A new Pentagon assessment of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle industrial base concludes that monthly production rates are poised to be slightly higher at year end than previously estimated, but also says the 1,300-vehicles-a-month target set by Defense Department leaders this summer could be hampered by an extraordinary increase in demand for ballistic steel.
The Army yesterday began equipping its first units in Iraq with Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, kicking off a four-day training course that will conclude with scores of blast-proof trucks fanning out across the country as the service begins fielding its planned fleet of 10,000 life-saving vehicles.
The Defense Department has quietly begun fielding Mine Resistant Ambush Protected trucks to Afghanistan, delivering nearly two-dozen MRAPs to Central Asia and expanding the U.S. military's employment of the new blast-proof truck to a second operational theater.
Two congressional defense panels with oversight of the Pentagon's $24.5 billion Mine Resistant Ambush Protected program are summoning key military and industry leaders to Capitol Hill next week for a review of the vehicles' production status as contractors gear up for a big surge in deliveries.
The armored truck builders spearheading the industrial campaign to support rapid manufacturing of the Pentagon's No. 1 acquisition priority -- the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle -- turned a corner in September, producing 12 percent more MRAPs than promised, according to government documents.
Boeing and Northrop Grumman, the two industry titans locked in a high-stakes competition to build a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers for the Air Force, this week made noteworthy announcements to investors about their respective tanker programs.
The Pentagon plans to spend another $4.5 billion on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle orders in fiscal year 2008, a sum that would provide funds to buy considerably more than the 6,500 armored trucks defense officials said last week would be procured in the coming weeks, according to sources familiar with MRAP funding plans.
Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England has locked in the first round of changes to the Pentagon's fiscal year 2009 to 2013 spending plan, most of which do not directly affect the weapon system modernization accounts, according to Pentagon officials.
The White House today sent Congress long-awaited details of the Pentagon's $42.3 billion amendment to the fiscal year 2008 war cost supplemental spending request, a package that includes more than $10 billion for 7,200 additional blast-proof trucks and $8.1 billion to continue military and intelligence operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to an administration fact sheet.
The Army is considering accelerating the procurement of select weapon systems in its new six-year spending plan in order to meet a recent directive from Gen. George Casey, the chief of staff, to bring the ground service into "balance" by 2011, according to senior service leaders.