LandWarfareIntl
Industry awaits FMTV announcement
This week’s 2010 Tactical Wheeled Vehicles Conference, sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Agency (NDIA), brought nearly 1000 attendees to two days of briefings and program updates in Monterey, California.
In addition to the official platform updates, many of the side industry discussions were focused on the expected imminent announcement of service direction on the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles (FMTV) production contract “re-buy” award.
Awarded to Oshkosh Defense on 26 August 2009, the award was protested to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which upheld elements of the protest, giving the Army until approximately 14 February to inform the GAO of its planned actions [See “Wheeled Vehicle Developments” NEWS in the --- issue of LWI].
Speaking to conference attendees on 9 February 2010, Colonel David Bassett, US Army Project Manager for Tactical Vehicles, jokingly opened his presentation with a preface to the much anticipated decision announcement.
Returning to the subject in great seriousness later in his talk, Bassett observed, “If we are going to do this competition thing, we have to be able to compete [a program] and get results,” he said. “We are going to do competition again and so we don’t look at the result of FMTV as anything that wasn’t expected. For whatever reason, protests are part of how we do business, it seems.
And my guidance to the team is, ‘It is not your job to run a competition where no one protests. This is a tough economy. People are going to protest. It is your job to run a competition that survives the protest; where we do the right thing; where the Army comes to the right decision; and where we get good value coming out of those competitions.’”
He continued, “So, some folks will look at the FMTV competition and say, ‘Look, I told you so. If we don’t compete we never get any savings. And now that we are competing, look at the savings you might get.’ And that is an interesting message that we are now sending to leadership. Do we think we are going to save as much on other programs as we have on FMTV? Probably not. Do we think that it took a competition to get the price down to where it made sense? Probably. So eventually – and it is NOT going to be me today, I guarantee that – there’s going to be an announcement on FMTV. And we are going to move out and execute that program.”
In the unofficial side discussions, some of the program’s industry observers expressed the private belief that the Army has already briefed the GAO on its decision and may begin to notify industry of that decision in the next few days.
By Scott R. Gourley, Monterey, California
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