Inside a cavernous former General Electrics turbine plant on the outskirts of this tiny town, hundreds of workers crawl over the shells of incomplete Cougar, Buffalo and Mastiff armored trucks. This is the assembly floor of Force Protection Inc., which builds a menagerie of blast-proof vehicles for an alphabet soup of Pentagon programs and a growing list of foreign customers.
Three years ago, the firm struggled to build a dozen vehicles per month for niche Army and Marine Corps orders, mostly Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams. By summer 2006 it had ramped up to 30 per month but sometimes fell behind schedule. A year later, Force Protection builds 200 trucks every month in Ladson, co-manufactures 300 with partners like General Dynamics Land Systems and BAE Systems, has doubled its staff and has stockpiled a three-month supply of materials.
Force Protection is finally ahead of the curve in what spokesman Tommy Pruitt calls “the single biggest military vehicle mobilization since World War II.”
Three years ago, Force Protection employed 200 people. Now it has nearly 1,000. Pruitt credits the state and local technical schools with helping recruit and train labor, but layoffs by automakers are the major reason workers are available. “Detroit’s problems have benefited us,” he admits. The firm runs two shifts, but Pruitt says a third might be necessary.
The pace of Force Protection’s expansion is deceptive. The firm manages demand by keeping around half of production at Ladson. The rest is farmed out to partners. Last November, Force Protection signed an agreement to share MRAP-related Cougar assembly with General Dynamics; previously it partnered with BAE to co-produce the Iraqi army Cougar.
But at the same time, General Dynamics and BAE are Force Protection’s competitors in MRAP: both won modest orders for their respective RG-31 and RG-33 designs. General Dynamics scored its most recent RG-31 order–$20 million for 44 vehicles–in June while Force Protection was awaiting long-expected MRAP orders. General Dynamics’ coup resulted in a $10 hit to Force Protection’s $30 stock price, which recovered then took another big hit when GD scored a big MRAP order this month.
These odd couplings are inevitable results of the MRAP mobilization. When it comes to blast-proof trucks, the Pentagon believes that timely deliveries trump other considerations, including traditional business relationships.
Read the whole weird story in Defense Technology International.
Related:
MRAP losers keep mum
MRAP photos!
Force Protection ramps up
Aussie MRAPs get the nod
Afghans get MRAPs, too
Related posts:
I was just thinking… Since Soldiers are trained in anti-ambush tactics with the Humvee’s using their speed and acceleration to get out of a bad spot… whats going to happen with the MRAPs?
Are they just fast a capable? Or is has the war changed that there aren’t many ambushes anymore? Just remote/trip detonations?
Some MRAPs are as speedy as Humvees, I believe, but there are many kinds of MRAPs. As for ambushes, most attacks are by IED. Not sure a marginal speed difference will really matter all that much.
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[...] So how much does one of these new-fangled bomb-resistant “MRAP” trucks really cost? Depends on who you ask and what you count, of course. [...]
Biggest military vehicle mobilization since WW2?
would that not be the production of an eventual 55,000 Soviet BMP-1 (armored vehicles) 1960s-1980s ?
http://www.historyofwar.org/articles/weapons_bmp1.html
By “mobilization,” I think he meant standing up industry to build something it had never really built before, and to do it in large quantity, fast. So it’s not just about the total number of vehicles.
[...] The rush $20-billion “Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected” vehicle program to provide bomb-resistant trucks to the U.S. military in Iraq faces a lot of potential bottlenecks. Factory capacity is one, shipping overseas is another — as is the distribution process overseas. Another is the installation of radios, machine guns, network terminals, radio jammers and sensors — all items that have transformed what are essentially 30-year-old African truck designs into modern combat vehicles. What with all this snazzy gear, Dr. Craig Arndt from MRAP-maker Ceradyne, likes to use a different term than “armored truck.” He calls them “counter-insurgency warfare vehicles.” [...]
[...] “An emotional debate,” is how Dakota Wood, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, describes the back-and-forth over Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored trucks for the U.S. military in Iraq: Moves toward a surge production of MRAPs [15,000 trucks in three years at a cost of around $20 billion — ed.] have only heightened attention on the force protection issue. For some, the MRAP surge is long overdue. It is almost an article of faith among the American public and Congress that the U.S. armed forces are the best equipped in the world, armed with weapons and combat systems designed to overmatch anything a potential enemy might bring to a battle. As a result, during wartime, perhaps no issue captures more attention than charges that the US armed forces are being equipped with anything less than the best the nation has to offer. In the Vietnam War, for example, charges that the new M-16 rifle was prone to jamming caused a political uproar and led to rapid improvements to the rifle that made it a more effective and reliable battlefield weapon. [...]
[...] Despite much hype, it’s not clear that the latest MRAP designs are up to the EFP challenge. And programmatic changes have got at least one industry official worried that the potentially $20-billion MRAP scheme is becoming more rigid, while insurgent bomb-makers continue to demonstrate remarkable adaptability. Most of the roughly dozen MRAP makers polled in September said they would submit vehicle proposals ahead of MRAP II’s October 1 deadline, but only two would talk specifics. While unverifiable, it’s generally assumed that EFP protection involves layered armor that attempts to tumble or slow the penetrator. [...]
[...] Defense News draws a parallel with the shortage of blast-resistant armored trucks (aka, "MRAPs") in Iraq two years ago. To get more of the lifesaving vehicles to the troops, the Pentagon undertook a World War II-style industrial mobilization, enlisting every available manufactures, licensing designs and investing heavily in raw materials. It worked. Could we do the same for drones? [...]
[...] Defense News draws a parallel with the shortage of blast-resistant armored trucks (aka, "MRAPs") in Iraq two years ago. To get more of the lifesaving vehicles to the troops, the Pentagon undertook a World War II-style industrial mobilization, enlisting every available manufactures, licensing designs and investing heavily in raw materials. It worked. Could we do the same for drones? [...]
MRAP vehicle issue is easily solved: copy the Sdkfz 234/2 armoured car in Chobham Armour, replace the 50mm main armament with a 30mm Vulcan (motorised Gatling, as in A10A Thunderbolt II) cannon, as in the vietnam era FIST Vehicle.
Result is a street-usable urban vehicle which is mighty hard to kill with IEDs or mines.
Astounding, that the blindingly obvious solution has not been produced.