I was asked just today what I thought of the spectacle of the talking heads on the cable news shows wondering aloud “why Detroit isn’t making military vehicle so they can stay in business.” Taking Detroit to mean Ford, GM, and Chrysler, we had a bit of a chuckle about that. Automotive assembly may be automotive assembly, but designing a military vehicle, as we’ve discovered in the Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected (MRAP) vehicle program, requires more than an F350 chassis and some hillbilly armor.
That said, Ford recently gave this the old college try, teaming up with Textron, Boeing, and SAIC for a Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) bid. It's not as though Textron’s ASV facility in Louisiana was going to have the capacity for the production numbers desired for the JLTV program. Ford would have had the muscle, but Textron, Boeing, and SAIC were supposed to bring the knowledge of land warfare, which is admittedly critical for a successful bid—like those of the three teams that actually won development contracts.
There are lots of places in the world where just "making military vehicles" could have been a plausible strategy. Daimler, Tatra, and Renault sell a lot of trucks to military customers around the world, but most of them are "commercial trucks painted green", as the head of marketing for a US-based military truck manufacturer put it to me recently. He wasn't being derisive about the products: if that's the level of off-road mobility and durability that one needs, then it's a good business decision. The US Army is one of the few customers in the world that has such a bespoke collection of vehicles, the prosaically-named Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV), for hauling cargo. Stewart & Stevenson licensed the original FMTV design from Steyr in Austria, but heavily modified it to meet the US Army's demands. It’s not quite the same truck now.
Ironically, then, the US military's insistence on developing custom products for its own use has foreclosed that avenue to those three companies, at least as they exist today. Of course, if they had wanted to get into that market, they could have done so at plenty of points. Just look at what Force Protection did with far fewer resources. Meanwhile, Waggoner, Mullaly, and Nardelli each flew into DC today on separate corporate jets to grovel for money. They couldn’t have carpooled, so to speak? These guys must have tin ears.
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