AM General, maker of the U.S. military's legacy light tactical vehicle fleet, will toss its hat in the ring for the upcoming competition to build Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, a move that presents incumbent Oshkosh with a formidable challenger and assures the Army an industrial rivalry that acquisition officials hope will drive innovation and a fair cost in an estimated $7.6 billion project.
Jim Cannon, AM General president and chief executive officer, said the South Bend, IN-based company -- which along with Lockheed Martin lost a three-way competition in 2015 for the original JLTV contract -- plans to bid for the new chance to build 16,000 JLTVs.
“The Army needs competition,” Cannon said in an Oct. 11 interview at the Association of the United States Army’s annual convention. “So, 100%: We're in to win JLTV.”
GM Defense is also a potential contender for the JLTV competition; however, company officials are not as unequivocal as AM General.
“We are still active in dialogue competition,” Rick Kewley, GM Defense vice president for product development and advanced engineering, told Inside Defense on Oct. 13. “It’s not a final RFP and we’re still active in that competition.”
Cannon, who joined AM General last month, is an Army veteran and was previously CEO of FLIR Systems, manufacturer of sensors and unmanned systems for military and industrial customers. Cannon oversaw the “strategic transformation and ultimate sale” of FLIR Systems to Teledyne Technologies, according to his company biography.
“We’re going to compete and win it,” Cannon said. “There are a handful of players out there in the U.S. light tactical vehicle space. We're one of them."
AM General, maker of the humvee, has produced approximately 250,000 light tactical vehicles to date with new vehicle orders still rolling in; the Army’s fiscal year 2022 budget buys 512 new humvees.
“Oshkosh is the incumbent and the incumbent a lot of times has all the advantage,” Cannon said. “But we've got capacity, we've got a mature supply chain, we've got a skilled workforce, like no other in the [United Auto Workers] Local 5, it's the oldest one in America.”
The union traces its roots to an American Federation of Labor outfit established in 1933 building Studebakers in South Bend.
“We have a right to compete and win and that's exactly what we intend to do,” Cannon said. “There's opportunities to put technical inserts to have a better mousetrap. We're looking hard at those things.”
The Army’s most recent report to Congress on JLTV program cost pegs the production unit cost at $480,000. That price tag on 16,000 vehicles over 10 years would be $7.6 billion.
“I don't know if anybody else in America has the kind of capacity that we have to make vehicles,” he said. “The sheer output that we can push out of South Bend, Indiana and the workforce we have there is pretty significant. So, when we think about what differentiates us to other competitors, you know that operational footprint in South Bend is a big deal."
He said AM General could take on the JLTV work and not break stride with its humvee production.
“We could do 10 times the number of vehicles that we're producing today, we could satisfy the JLTV and humvee combined requirements for the next decade, with very little capital at all,” Cannon said.
He said AM General is also crafting options in addition to brute industrial muscle as part of its JLTV pitch.
“We're thinking about how we can be disruptive and leverage every asset we have available,” Cannon said. “We're going to approach this very differently than we've approached other pursuits in the past.”
He said that includes potential collaboration with academic institutions. Asked if that meant professors and students from nearby Notre Dame University might be involved, he declined to name a school.
What could students possibly contribute in a contest to deliver a build-to-print vehicle?
“There are tons of smart young engineers with innovative ideas that haven't been building military vehicles for 10 years, so [they bring] innovative thought, totally different perspectives on what's possible and a commercial mindset,” said Cannon. “You know right now some of the innovation that we see in commercial industry is far outpacing what's happening inside of our industry and we want to tap into that.”