War Is Boring

MRAP Mysteries Vex Contractors

08.10.07

Categorie: Vehicles |

15,000 trucks. $20 billion. And a Hell of a lot of urgency, at least by government bureaucracy standards. Tumble all that together and you get the Pentagon’s crash program to replace every combat-roled Humvee in Iraq. The goal? To protect troops against increasingly powerful Improvised Explosive Devices and Explosively Formed Penetrators that have already claimed 1,500 lives.

A year into the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicle program, roughly a dozen contractors have won orders for their respective truck designs. There have been big winners — Force Protection, IMG and BAE — and a few big losers, especially Oshkosh, a major truck-maker that teamed up on no fewer than three different designs but has sold no more than 170 vehicles so far. Exactly why is a matter of intense speculation. Some blame the bumbling MRAP management team, led by the Marine Corps. Others contend that Oshkosh invested in flawed designs.

“We know our vehicle passed all the tests,” says Ross Montalio from Thales Australia, which joined Oshkosh on the Bushmaster truck for MRAP I. Despite being popular with the Dutch and Australians in Afghanistan, Bushmaster failed to win an MRAP production contract. A lack of side doors for the driver and commander might be to blame, although Motalio insists his team was prepared to add doors on short notice. Some observers have questioned whether the Pentagon favored certain traditional defense firms specializing in combat vehicles, as opposed to Oshkosh with its core civilian market.

Regardless, MRAP ain’t over, with a second round of purchases — up to 8,000 trucks — slated to begin in January. Oshkosh is back in a big way in MRAP II. It has teamed up with Thales Australia on a re-designed Bushmaster in both 4×4 and 6×6 models and is also partnered with Ceradyne on the Bull, which was conceived from the ground up to defeat those super-lethal EFPs.

The new Bushmaster actually has its roots in the U.S. Army’s new program to buy as many as 1,400 MRAP-type vehicles for engineers and bomb squads. The so-called Medium Mine-Protected Vehicle program is essentially an MRAP adjunct but has slightly tougher requirements than MRAP I. And if the new Bushmaster — with its side doors, raised roof and bigger payload — meets the MMPV standards, it should be good for MRAP II, too, Montalio says.

Bull is an entirely different animal. This thing is HUGE and HEAVY. As well it should be, considering the amount of armor piled on it. Like many MRAP designs, Bull comes in two variants: a 6-passenger and a 10-passenger model. Most MRAP makers chose to offer shortened designs for the 6-person requirement, but Ceradyne and Oshkosh stuck with the same basic chassis for both models. Only with the small version, the back half of the cab has been replaced by a cargo bed. Whereas other manufacturers understood the 6-person requirement as a request for a smaller vehicle, “we understood it as they wanted storage,” Ceradyne’s Michael Benjamin says.