THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The seldom loved Humvee is being replaced by something the military has been working on for the last 10 years, which should give everyone pause.

After a storied career that spanned the 1989 invasion of Panama, the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Bosnia, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States’ fleet of Humvees is entering its twilight, and they are being sold to the highest bidder by the dozen. The vehicle is an icon of the U.S. military that replaced the Jeep and spawned a gas-guzzling commercial cousin that symbolized American ego and extravagance.

But now the Army wants a tougher, yet nimble vehicle, light enough so that a helicopter could fly it around, but resilient enough to withstand bomb blasts.

In one of the most important — and lucrative — contracts awarded by the Army in years, three major defense firms are competing for the $30 billion prize to build 55,000 vehicles, called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which would debut as one of the military’s most high-profile vehicles in a generation.

Wars are often measured by the box-score statistics: battles won and lost, us-vs.-them casualties, cities sacked, shorelines held. But they are also defined by their arsenals — just as the rumble of a Sherman tank was the soundtrack of World War II, so, too, was the riff of Huey chopper blades in Vietnam.

And now comes a new entrant to the symphonic cacophony of the Next War — the mad-scientist mating of a Jeep with a tank. After a decade in development, the Pentagon is about to unveil the JLTV, designed for front-line combat as well as ferrying supplies behind the wire...

It is supposed to be as mobile as an unarmored Humvee, an able off-roader but also powerful enough to withstand the same blasts as the MRAP — all while hauling plenty of cargo.

The bidding has attracted three defense giants for the contract, which is expected to be awarded this summer: AM General, which built the Humvee; Oshkosh, which built the MRAP; and Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contractor.

Though known primarily for its aerospace business — Lockheed makes the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter — the Bethesda, Md.-based company was drawn to the competition because it “was viewed as a particularly challenging engineering proposition,” said Scott Greene, vice president of the ground vehicles division. The goal, he said, is to “bring the properties of the different vehicles and combine those attributes into a much smaller package.”

No doubt Lockheed is drooling at the thought of milking this contract like they have done with the F-35 Flying Brick. An overpriced, undercapable piece of junk ordered in large quantities is what they do best.








JTLV prototype