Defense Industry News - AM General

AM General LLC announced Mar. 28 that it is backing two separate proposals for the Engineering, Manufacturing and Development (EMD) phase of the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) program. AM General has submitted an independent JLTV solution for the EMD phase based on more than a decade of the company's own investments in research, development and testing for the next-generation light tactical military vehicle.

AM General's new Blast-Resistant Vehicle – Off Road (BRV-O) is a highly mobile and versatile platform that meets or exceeds 100 percent of the government's program evaluation criteria including protection, performance, payload, transportability, reliability and affordability. BRV-O features a crew capsule and modular armor already proven effective in government-supervised blast testing. This AM General design can be readily adapted to future changes in U.S. military missions, enemy threats and new protection technologies as they emerge.

BRV-O also features a lightweight, fuel efficient, high performance engine; a self-leveling suspension system; a C4ISR backbone with open-standard networked architecture and clustered super-computing power, and other advanced components. These and other mature subsystems have been tested, refined and validated. This makes BRV-O cost effective and production ready, with the high degree of reliability needed by U.S. service members.

AM General also is supporting a separate proposal from General Tactical Vehicles, the joint venture formed in 2007 with General Dynamics Land Systems. GTV received one of three Defense Department contracts for the Technology Demonstration phase of the JLTV program.

Both of the proposals backed by AM General have the added value of the company's 50-plus years of experience – making it, by far, the most experienced light tactical military vehicle developer and manufacturer in the United States.