Army Places Order for More JLTVs

The U.S. Army has placed a $42 million order with Oshkosh Defense, LLC to build Joint Light Tactical Vehicles.

Oshkosh is slated to manufacture 130 JLTVs and 748 vehicle kits by November 2017, Oshkosh officials said Monday.

This is the third order under the original contract. The Army awarded Oshkosh a $6.7 billion contract in August 2015 to build the first 17,000 production models of the JLTV. It placed a second order of $243 million in March 2016 for 657 JLTVs.

The work could eventually be worth some $30 billion, as the Army and Marine Corps plan to buy nearly 55,000 of the combat vehicles, including 49,100 for the Army and 5,500 for the Corps, to replace about a third of the Humvee fleets.

"This latest order demonstrates that the JLTV continues to be a central piece of the Army's future ground force and a modernization priority," said Dave Diersen, Oshkosh Defense vice president of Joint Programs, in a Sept. 26 press release. "The JLTV program is moving forward with a focus on giving soldiers and Marines the next generation light vehicle they need for their missions."

Oshkosh, maker of the Army's fleet of medium- and heavy-tactical trucks and all-terrain-version of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected, or MRAP, vehicle, known as the M-ATV, beat out Lockheed Martin Corp. and Humvee-maker AM General for the low-rate initial production contract.

Lockheed Martin filed a formal protest of the Army's decision to award Oshkosh the JLTV contract in September 2015 only to withdraw the protest in early 2016.

The Defense Department released a report in February in which the Pentagon's top weapons tester, J. Michael Gilmore, concluded that Oshkosh's vehicle performed far more reliably than its competitors, as measured by the average number of miles between failures.