On 12 February, Marine Corps Systems Command announced the award of three further contracts in the Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle program. MARSYSCOM, that is, is managing MRAP purchases program for all the services, but the individual services are by-and-large making their own decisions about what to buy. Including engineering changes for independent suspensions and other mobility improvements, the amounts were
- $752 million to Navistar Defense for 1,050 MaxxPro Dashes, to be built in Mississippi and Texas
- $227 million to General Dynamics for 250 RG-31A2s, to be built by BAE Systems in Gauteng Province, South Africa, with major subassembly work in Ohio and New York
- $91 million to BAE Systems for 58 RG-33s, to be built in Pennsylvania
The orders for the RGs were not surprising, as the Army and SOCOM seem to have picked that family of vehicles as a preferred long-term solution. The RG-33, after all, is the basis of the Panther Medium Mine Protected Vehicle (MMPV), which the Army is procuring for its engineering troops in an actual program of record.
The order for the MaxxPros was leaked a few weeks ago from the office of Ashton Carter, the under secretary of defense for acquisition. Mobility seems to have been the selling point here, as the MaxxPro Dash is particularly interesting for Afghanistan. First, it was designed from the get-go to be lighter than the average MRAP. Second, following Oshkosh’s success with porting its TAK-4 independent suspension to military applications, Hendrickson and AxleTech (now a unit of General Dynamics) have teamed up to provide their DXM independent suspension to the new MaxxPros. Oshkosh, for its part, is producing its MRAP All Terrain Vehicles (M-ATVs) rather quickly, but wartime expediency sometimes leads to second sources and approaches to speed kit to the troops. It’s a reasonable matter for procurement strategy, but a more restrained approach than the order-from-everybody-qualified tack taken early in the MRAP program.
Indeed, as the Ares blog noted, a spokesman for MARSYSCOM noted that “future MRAP family of vehicle orders may also include additional M-ATVs.” What it has not included for some time is orders from manufacturers other than BAE, Oshhosh, and Navistar. That has been bad news for Force Protection in particular, which blazed a trail with both marketing and design in bringing the MRAP concept to the US some ten years ago. It’s no secret that the chief complaint about Force Protection’s Cougar, its best seller to date, has been its relative reliability. As I wrote in my book Arms and Innovation (University of Chicago Press, 2008), a colonel of marines in Iraq notably told Force Protection’s marketing representative a few years ago that while he loved the vehicle, “there are no land mines in my motor pool.”
Force Protection, of course, has been working hard to overcome both the perception and its root cause. For Navistar’s part—or Oshkosh’s for that matter—a worldwide customer base and worldwide commercial supply chain have been important selling points. Companies like Force Protection aren’t likely to duplicate those easily. What they can do is to master important and lucrative niche markets where single attributes stand out as dominating designs. Force Protection’s Buffalo A2 may have competition from claw-equipped versions of BAE’s RG33 and Thales ADI’s Bushmaster, but it clearly leads its category in sales. Moreover, it has earned the coveted status of a program of record, fulfilling the US Army’s enduring need for a Ground Standoff Mine Detection System, or GSTAMIDS. When poking possible mines, blast-resistance is the overwhelming requirement.
Thus, Force Protection came to lead that niche, and perhaps to fall short in others, by focusing so intently on protection. First-hand historical experience led the company in that direction. In thinking about this, it’s important to remember that the MRAP was not so much a conceptual innovation as an emulation. The strategy, the technology, and even the key people developing the vehicles have been South African in origin. South Africa’s military situation in the 1970s led that country’s arms industry to develop what Michael Porter termed a selective factor disadvantage: faced with an overwhelming threat from land mines, they got really good at designing and building vehicles that resisted land mines.
Emulation, though, generally suggests that entry barriers, if technically demanding, are eventually surmountable. In the film version of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, Senator Lyndon Johnson (played by Donald Moffat) asks a roomful of government officials stunned by the Sputnik launch whether it’s “their German scientists that got them up there first”. Werner von Braun (played by Scott Beach) steps from the shadows to calmly state “no, Senator. Our Germans are better than their Germans.” Eventually, the Americans’ rockets stopped blowing up on the pads.
To wit, this week at the Indian Defence Exposition, three local companies—Tata Motors, Ashok Leyland, and Defence Land Systems India—showed their own prototypes of mine-resistant wheeled troop carriers. Granted, DSL India is a joint venture of Mahindra & Mahindra and BAE Systems, and its Mine Protected Vehicle for India (MPV-I) is based on the technology in the RG series. But Tata and Ashok Leyland, whoever their suppliers may be, have ostensibly developed their vehicles on their own. This should be no surprise. For whosever South Africans or Americans or Indians are better, there are more than enough to go around now.
As I noted in Arms and Innovation, the technologies of blast-protection are challenging, but they are also somewhat leaky and somewhat observable. That’s encouraging of alliances in the short run, and conducive to the diffusion of military innovations in the long run. As their are more than a few heavy-duty truck companies in the world, we can expect that the structure of this industry will probably remain geographically distributed and meaningfully heterogeneous. That will leave more than enough room for small companies to specialize, and big companies to build for the mass market. In between, they might find continued opportunities to cooperate. That, after all, was part of what made the MRAP program so successful in the first place. And that will be very good for the troops.
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