Marine Corps photo

A Marine Corps JLTV during a demonstration at Camp Pendleton in 2019

WASHINGTON: At a secretive General Motors facility outside Detroit, three dozen GM Defense engineers have taken apart one of rival Oshkosh’s Joint Light Tactical Vehicles and are studying every nut and bolt so they can replicate it.

“Sydney, I have to tell you, it’s so much fun,” said lead engineer Ronda Uhl, a veteran of 30 years with GM. “This is like an engineer’s dream. You talk about playing with Legos…. We get to do that at the scale of a JLTV” – a seven-ton armored 4×4 designed to resist roadside bombs, landmines, and small arms fire.

You see, while Oshkosh Defense designed and builds the JLTV, it doesn’t own the Technical Data Package describing all the parts. The government does, and it’s giving that detailed technical data to other companies as it prepares to recompete the program next year, hoping to find a cheaper builder.

But the TDP does not include the detailed instructions that Oshkosh assembly line workers use to actually put the vehicle together. “The instructions were left out of the Lego box,” Uhl told me with a chuckle. “We’re not being handed those assembly manuals or those assembly drawings.”

So, she said, “we are taking our time…taking it apart and putting it back together again in a very slow methodical process.”

Reconstructing and copying the JLTV is a tremendous engineering challenge – but one Uhl and her team feel confident they can handle, drawing on the tremendous engineering depth of their parent company.

Oshkosh photo

JLTV on the Oshkosh production line.

Advantage, Oshkosh?

Oshkosh, of course, is deeply skeptical that GM Defense – or any other potential contender – can replicate its experience building JLTV. “They have the Technical Data Package,” acknowledged Oshkosh Defense president John Bryant, but they don’t have Oshkosh’s detailed how-to guides on how to efficiently assemble the vehicle, the tooling set up to build JLTVs, or workforce trained to use them.

“Having the access to the technical data is of course helpful – you couldn’t build it without it,” he told me with a chuckle, but that’s no substitute for “the knowledge gained from having built over 10,000 of the vehicles.”

Now, GM does make millions of civilian cars and trucks, and GM Defense specifically is building 651 air-droppable militarized versions of its ZR2 Colorado, the Infantry Squad Vehicle. But Oshkosh – which manufactures civilian vehicles as well – argues JLTV is fundamentally different. “These are not commercial vehicles,” Bryant told me. “You’re talking about high technology vehicles. You’re talking about armor, you’re talking about very stringent US government quality standards. It’s a much more challenging vehicle to build than our normal commercial products.”

Oshkosh absolutely has an incumbent advantage, admitted GM Defense’s chief engineer, Richard Kewley, and JLTV is very different from the Infantry Squad Vehicle, let alone civilian cars.

To start with, a JLTV weighs seven tons – and that’s curb weight, not fully loaded. Nothing in the GM portfolio is that heavy, the company admits. ISV specifically has a curb weight of under 2.5 tons (5,000 lbs) to allow it to be sling-loaded under a helicopter, and it’s got an open frame like a dune buggy, in stark contrast to the heavily armored capsule enclosing the crew and passengers of a JLTV.

GM Defense photo

GM Defense Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV)

But, Kewley argued, much of GM’s disadvantage is due to the specific way the recompetition is structured, with Oshkosh only having to share the Technical Data Package and not its assembly manuals or other information.

“This best value recompete … in a lot of ways we think advantages the incumbent,” Kewley told me. “There are elements that we cannot see into, [so] we’re going to be very much dependent on how well the DoD team and the military are able to give us insight into each of those pieces.”

Yes, the Army is open to some improvements in the JLTV design, especially the engine, which may soon be out of production. But otherwise the military wants something as identical to its existing JLTVs as possible, to simplify training, maintenance, and sustainment. Competitors’ scores are docked for deviations from the original design.

“Where we have to deviate and go to a unique solution,” he said, “there’s essentially a demerit in the process for changing any of those components.”

So the recompete, as it’s currently structured, may not be the best way for the Army to harness GM Defense or the industrial might of its parent company, Kewley continued. “We think it’s worthwhile,” he said, “that the military look at the potential for a split buy that uses a cooperative approach to bring in a second manufacturer, as opposed to a direct competitive approach.

Army photo

FTMV truck

The service so far has not hinted it would split the buy this way, however.

Even with a winner-take-all contest, it is possible for an outsider to win a recompete of this kind – and Oshkosh itself has done it. In 2009, it took over the Army’s three-axle truck program, the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FTMV), from BAE Systems.

That was a program where a different incumbent had been building the vehicles for years, the government had the rights to the technical data package and competed the program, and Oshkosh Defense competed and won,” Bryant recounted.

The FMTV is “a much simpler vehicle” than JLTV, Bryant said, but the precedent is hard for Oshkosh to miss.

So this competition is a very real test for both companies. In Part 2 of this story, out tomorrow, we do an in-depth comparison of Oshkosh and GM Defense.