Sustaining the MRAP

Written by Peter Buxbaum

MLF 2010 Volume: 4 Issue: 1 (February)

BORN OF URGENT NEED, THE MINE RESISTANT,
AMBUSH PROTECTED VEHICLES NEED TO BE
LOOKED AT FROM A LONG-TERM SUSTAINMENT PERSPECTIVE.

United States operations in Iraq took a 180 degree turn during the second half of 2003, when the fast paced, mechanized, expeditionary war that quickly took down Saddam Hussein’s regime turned into a slogging counterinsurgency operation, often staged on complex urban terrain.

That change in venue and operational tempo left U.S. troops, in their lightly armored vehicles, vulnerable to roadside attacks from improvised explosive devices. In 2007, IEDs accounted for two-thirds of U.S. fatalities in Iraq.

From an equipment standpoint, the answer given by the Department of Defense to these developments was to sink $25 billion to acquire mine resistant ambush protected (MRAP) vehicles. Why? Because these heavy, lumbering trucks are best suited to protect troops from IEDs. Their height and weight shield the troops sequestered inside and their V-shaped undercarriage deflects the force of an IED blast away from the underbody of the vehicle.

The hurry-up acquisition of some 15,000 MRAPs has presented formidable challenges to the maintenance and sustainment of the vehicles in theater. Despite the presence of MRAPs in Southwest Asia for several years, the vehicles have not yet become part of the armed services’ force structure. Instead, they are supplied to troops in theater with little opportunity for warfighters to train in vehicle operation or maintenance at their home stations.

By all accounts, the military has partnered effectively with its MRAP suppliers and other contractors to establish an effective maintenance and sustainment framework in theater. This has involved a hybrid approach, in which contractors work in tandem with uniformed mechanics, which is evolving to place greater emphasis on organic military capabilities. With the MRAP expected to be introduced to the Army and Marine Corps force structures, greater numbers of the vehicles will find their ways to home stations, where warfighters can become fully acquainted with operations and maintenance before being deployed.

“MRAPs are theater provided equipment,” said Karen Kulie, the associate director for logistics and sustainment within the U.S. Army TACOM Life Cycle Management Command’s Joint Program Office MRAP. “The plan initially was to buy a small fleet for the Marine Corps, and then hand them over to the Iraqis or throw them away. We ended up buying much more than we expected, and the plan is to keep them in the force structure.” The fact that DoD went from an inventory of zero MRAPs to 15,000 vehicles in less than three years meant that the military and its contractors had to play a game of catch-up. “Normally when fielding a new vehicle you go through seven years of rigmarole,” said Kulie. “There are processes for provisioning data on repair parts, you have to stock the repair parts, and you go through a long, laborious process of preparing technical manuals.”

But the MRAPs “were procured with such speed, it was impossible to follow a normal development path,” said Steve Smith, deputy director logistics for the MRAP program at the U.S. Marine Corps. “This was more complicated and more challenging than procuring the D-Day landing craft during World War II.”

The fact that MRAPs have yet to be incorporated into Army and Marine Corps force structures means warfighters, including green-suited mechanics, were less familiar with the vehicle than with others they work on day-to-day. “If a brigade were to deploy tomorrow, they would take their Abrams and their Bradleys with them,” explained Kulie. “With MRAPs, the units don’t actually own the vehicles. It’s more like a rent-a-car.”

In order to simplify MRAP maintenance and sustainment challenges, the MRAP original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) endeavored to design vehicles to assure ready availability of replacement parts. For example, the MRAP All Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV), an MRAP variant supplied by Oshkosh Defense and currently deployed to Afghanistan, is built on the Marine Corps Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement (MTVR) chassis.

“This affords some parts commonality that reduces the logistics burden for the U.S. military,” said Ken Juergens, the M-ATV program director for Oshkosh Defense. “Oshkosh also is providing spare parts parallel to the production of the vehicles so every M-ATV in theater has the spare parts and equipment needed to maintain it. It also helps to have factory-trained technicians, in the form of Oshkosh field service representatives, in theater to provide instruction and advice, or to step in to perform maintenance and repairs.”

Oshkosh is under contract for more than 6,600 vehicles and is producing them at a rate of 1,000 per month. The company is also providing its TAK-4 suspension in kit which helps adapt various MRAP models to the off-road movements characteristic of operations in Afghanistan.

At Force Protection, the Cougar MRAP was designed to avoid reliance on OEM-unique parts. “We wanted power trains, suspension system and axles to be available, and to the maximum extent possible, common [among the several models of Cougars] in order to minimize stockage requirements,” said Jim Grazioplene, Force Protection’s executive vice president for total life cycle support. Also important to Force Protection was equipment that could be repaired at the lowest possible maintenance depot to get the vehicles “back in the fight within 48 hours.”

The military, meanwhile, has pursued a hybrid approach to maintenance and sustainment, utilizing capabilities of both uniformed and contracted mechanics to repair and sustain the MRAPs. “Down the road we want to take a pure organic approach in which uniformed personnel take care of the vehicles in the long term,” said Smith. “We’re somewhere in the middle right now. As the infrastructure in Afghanistan gets more mature we will be able to put more repair sites out there and put more troops at each site.”

Much of the regular, day-to-day tactical level MRAP maintenance is currently performed by uniformed mechanics, according to Kulie. “The manufacturers provide field service representatives to give our mechanics reach back engineering capabilities to OEM plants for a greater level of expertise,” she said.

Currently, TACOM maintains four regional sustainment centers at forward locations in Iraq and five in Afghanistan. A full-service facility also exists in Kuwait where vehicles taken out of the fight for more than 30 days are reset.

“Two common issues of in-theater maintenance tend to be the availability of spare parts and labor,” said Juergens. “For the M-ATV program, the government has contracted for spares to include ASL [authorized stock level], PLL [prescribed load list], BDAR [battlefield damage assessment and repair] parts, and de-processing kits. We pre-position M-ATV spares now because of lessons learned on the MRAP program. M-ATV parts are shipped with the vehicles and pre-positioned for minimal vehicle downtime. Oshkosh also is under contract to provide field service representatives, which solves the labor issue.” Oshkosh currently provides field services representatives in Kuwait as well as Jalalabad, Kandahar, Bagram, Bastion and Sharana in Afghanistan.

DynCorp International is under contract to Navistar International, the Maxxpro MRAP OEM, to provide training and sustainment in the Southwest Asia theater. “We have people in Afghanistan and Iraq providing instruction on how to use vehicles and mechanics to keep operational readiness rates up,” said George Krivo, DynCorp’s vice president of land systems. “Generally our focus in on Navistar, but in the case of urgent operational requirements we will support whatever our customer tells us.”

DynCorp currently has 300 personnel in theater, each of whom signs a one-year foreign service agreement.

DynCorp’s willingness to support non-Navistar equipment is emblematic of what Kulie calls a “consortium approach” to MRAP sustainment. “This has been groundbreaking,” she said. “We have a number of MRAP OEMs and these vendors are usually serious about protecting their data. But we realized early on that because of the rapid deployment of the vehicles we could not control their distribution and meet the enemy threat. We could not hire indefinite numbers of field service representatives. Warfighters have to feed and house these contractors, and we wanted to minimize the burden on the troops.”

Spare parts for MRAPs, in the first instance, flow through the normal military supply chain, with the Defense Logistics Agency and TACOM playing an important role in gathering demand data and placing orders. “DLA is more involved with purchasing long-term sustainment items,” said Jim Grooms, director of fleet support at Navistar Defense. The TACOM Contracting Center is also involved with acquiring repair parts for MRAPs.

Navistar, as an international truck manufacturer with global supply and dealer networks, has brought its own supply chain capabilities to bear in the MRAP repair and sustainment efforts. “This is where Navistar as an OEM and key member of the MRAP family provides a pretty good value offering to the government,” said Grooms. “We have 11 parts-distribution centers worldwide and the ability to do online ordering for parts. Navistar’s reach goes way beyond its military business, and we are able to tap into our parent organization’s pre-positioning of parts throughout the world in strategic locations to shorten supply chains and expedite deliveries to users.”

Navistar has dealers in Iraq and Afghanistan, in fact, and those dealers have been recruited to provide parts service for Navistar MRAPs located in those areas of operation. “We have leveraged our dealer network to the maximum extent possible,” said Grooms. “Our international truck business is supported through a vast international dealer network. Military vehicles are supported out of these commercial dealerships.”

The hurry-up acquisition and deployment of the MRAPs has also challenged suppliers of communications equipment. At Harris Corporation, which has supplied SINCGARS (Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System) radios to the vehicles, MRAPs have taken priority over other programs on which it is working.

“On the last two orders we received last December, we shipped the equipment the same day we received the order,” said Walter Monaco, director of U.S. DoD program management at Harris Corporation.

Harris has been working on the MRAP program for three years and provides support in a number of ways. Besides providing communications equipment, the company also provides the government with installation analysis to provide the optimal solution for the placement of radios, cabling and antennas within the vehicles.

Harris also has a presence of 15 to 18 personnel in Iraq to provide support for Harris radios in general and those installed in MRAPs in particular. “We are able to troubleshoot problems quickly and get them resolved,” said Monaco.

Harris is in the process of setting up a facility in Afghanistan. “We are working with the Marine Corps to set up additional units in Afghanistan to support MRAPs as they get fielded to that country in the next six to 12 months,” said Monaco.

As the U.S. troop drawdown from Iraq continues, more and more of the MRAPs will be finding their way to Afghanistan. The Marine Corps is in the process of setting up an infrastructure in forward locations to support the vehicles, according to Smith. Many of the MRAPs being withdrawn from Iraq are first making their way to Kuwait, where their suspension systems are being upgraded to support greater off-road movements which will be necessary in Afghanistan.

As the MRAPs become more and more of a fixture among U.S. warfighters, a serious effort to align the vehicles with institutional requirements has come about. One such effort which has gained steam within the last year and a half has been to develop technical and operational manuals for MRAPs and to generate parts catalogs for the vehicles.

The cataloging effort is focused on standardizing the parts nomenclature and numbers for various MRAP variants. “This has become a really critical aspect of our efforts,” said Force Protection’s Jim Grazioplene. “We are working with our Army and the Marine Corps counterparts to complete catalogs for the all the MRAP variants we manufacture.”

This effort will become all the more urgent as MRAPs are expected to be funded through the normal program budgetary process, as opposed to special wartime appropriations, by 2012. This will coincide with the expected adoption of the MRAP into Army and Marine Corps force structures. That means that the vehicles will be positioned with troops in their home stations and a repair and sustainment facility for MRAPs established stateside. ♦

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