Check out the front page of McPaper, I mean USA Today, today.
Salient points:
$100K for buggered M151
Has a DIESEL so it can run on the same fuel as Osprey
Also fire danger less
Carolina Growler has one a lot cheaper.
Although not a Jeep product, trademark of DCX, they call it a jeep anyway. Must be a generic term.
Did I mention....DIESEL?
Bret Ludwig did pass the time by typing:
And they wonder why there isn't enough money to train or outfit the troups.
USA Today article here:
I'm not given to defending pork in the military budget, mind you, but it is a bit more complicate than simply a buggered M-151:
It is designed to fit into the cargo bay of the V-22 Osprey, the tilt-wing aircraft from the mid 1980s that likes to screw itself into the ground. Frankly, I thought that the Osprey program had been canceled, but that's a different barrel of pork.
Highlights: The bay is only 5' x 5' x 17' and was designed to carry ground pounders, not vehicles. The artillery system consists of the modified Growler as a prime mover, a 120mm towed rifled weapon (on a carriage modified to fit the V-22), a gun crew of three and 24 rounds (because of the V-22s payload weight limitations.) Vehicle axle loads cannot exceed 2,450 per axle. The militarized Growler will have a machine gun mount on the back of the truck. Because the vehicle is so narrow they had to lower it to improve stability. We all know what lowering does to off-road capability.
That's the Single Battlefield Fuel program, started in the 1980s. See:
It means that the military need only establish a single fuel pipeline system for all operations instead of multiple parallel systems. It also means that if you're out of tanks and trucks you can cannabilize the fuel stores to operate your helocopters.
But it apparently isn't the same vehicle -- it was redesigned to fit that damned V-22, so part of that cost is in engineering, part is in retooling, part is in conforming to milspec. Plus profit. Plus a healthy amount of padding to cover the cost of change orders, so when DoD comes back to them after the initial trials and says "We like it just as it is. Oh, could you make it 3" narrower? And could you make the wheels 2" taller? And could you add armor? And some sort of explosives-sniffing sensors to the front? And could you make it invisible to radar?" they don't lose their shirts.
Poking around the web I couldn't find anything that would tell me how much oversight documentation added to the cost of things bought by Unka Sam (although I did find a think-tank or two that claimed that such costs are not routinely tracked). But I can tell you that a machinist friend of mine won't do government contract work because, he says, just the time spent doing the paperwork would kill him.
They did call it a jeep small-J, not a jeep big-J. USAToday will be hearing from DCX, no doubt. Defending trademarks is a growing business.
Yeah. JP-8 actually.
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