U.S. troops first started driving Humvees in the 1980s. At the rate things are going, they may keep on driving ‘em forever. In recent days, the Commandant of the Marine Corps and Army officials have complained that the Hummer successors are too heavy and too expensive. Which may put a decade-long effort to restock the military’s light tactical vehicle fleet in the ditch. Again.
Humvees are infinitely configurable, and are great off-roaders. But even with a loads of extra armor, they’re poor choices for bomb-rich locales like Afghanistan and Iraq. (Hummers’ square bottoms tend to absorb explosions, instead of deflecting them.) Plus: the things get crappy mileage, they don’t leave much room for passengers, and they’re not designed to hold to loads of electronics that modern infantrymen count on.
But programs to build Humvee replacements kept getting sidetracked. Emergency purchases of uparmored Hummers for the Iraq war messed with the development of a new vehicle. So did competing designs for the new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles, or JLTVs. Some were deemed too pricey; others just about “violated the laws of physics,” as National Defense magazine put it, by piling on so much armor onto a thin frame. The whole effort was sent back to the drawing board.
Then the Pentagon launched a crash program to buy tens of thousands of heavily armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles for troops in today’s wars. The 30-ton MRAPs — five or six times the weight of Hummers — were supposed to be niche vehicles, to fill a short-term need: keeping American forces safe from Iraq’s roadside bombs. “They were afraid they’d wind up with thousands of them in a big car park at the end of the war,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told me last year. “My attitude was: If you’re in a war, it’s all in. I don’t care what we have left over at the end.”
Keen observers, like Sharon Weinberger, figured the MRAPs spelled trouble for any next-gen Humvee. “Who here in the Danger Room thinks the military, after spending billions on a “stopgap” vehicle like the MRAP, is going to have the cash to buy a dream fleet of replacement vehicles?” she asked in early 2007. Those questions became all-the-more acute as the Pentagon began buying all-terrain version of the MRAPs — ones that could go off-road, and weighed only 13 tons or so.
In late 2008, the military handed three teams of defense contractors about $120 million to develop prototypes of the JLTVs over the next 27 months. The idea was to combine the six-ton Humvee’s ability with the 30-ton MRAP’s toughness — and do it all in a vehicle under 10 tons, light enough to be carried by a C-130 cargo plane or a Chinook helicopter. From there, two companies would get engineering contracts, and then one company would snag the monster deal to build tens of thousands of the things. The idea was to have a final version ready to go by 2015 or so.
Despite the occasional miscue — like Lockheed flipping one of its trucks with a reporter inside — the project appeared to be broadly on track.
But lately, top Marines have been wondering — loudly wondering — whether the JLTV was light enough and cheap enough to buy in big numbers. 10 tons still sounds awfully big for a force that’s looking to move into a warzone quickly. Plus, the Marines already have all these Humvees and MRAPs in their arsenal.
“We’ve got thousands of up-armored Humvees out there sitting around [and we're] wondering what we’re going to do with them,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway tells InsideDefense.com.
Defense News reports that the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab is wrapping up testing of a protective capsule that could be bolted on to today’s Humvees, making them safer rides for the troops inside — and further undermining the case for the JLTV.
“There’s no way that the Marine Corps is going to be able to afford $300,000 a copy for a utility vehicle, so that starts out being way overpriced,” he adds. “I don’t think we’re going to have the money to buy new.”
If anything, Conway may be low-balling the JLTV’s cost. Fully loaded with weapons and radios and electronics, the final sticker price could be as much as $600,000, InsideDefense.com reports. Which has got the Army wondering, too, how many of the vehicles they should really buy. Rather than replace all of their Humvees, InsideDefense.com hears, the service is now mulling a plan to buy 50,000 vehicles — by 2035. Which means troops may still be driving Humvees more than a half-century after the U.S. military drafted ‘em into service.
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