Pat Williams is the Chief Program Officer for Oshkosh Defense and therefore one of the busiest men at the recent IAV Conference in Farnborough. Nevertheless, he found time to sit down with Tim Mahon from Defence Alternatives after the show and to answer some pointed questions vis-à-vis the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) platform.
Defence Alternatives: The Dutch MoD recently ordered a second batch of the DXPV (Dutch Expeditionary Patrol Vehicle), based on your JLTV design. Do you see this as a harbinger of fresh interest in light tactical vehicles or is it just the latest iteration of what the Dutch originally required?
Patrick Williams: That’s a very good question and I’ll preface this by saying I can’t really speak for what our allied or international partners or otherwise are going to do. But to me, it just kind of spells out both. Obviously from a Dutch perspective, it’s another opportunity to use this vehicle for a different mission set from a UAS angle, just showcasing the flexibility of the platform. We have a number of partners overseas discussing with us light tactical vehicle programs – and in each case it’s a variation of a JLTV tailored to meet a specific mission, satisfying a specific need but really based on the foundation of the JLTV, of which we have fielded over 24,000 worldwide. It is a demonstrated, highly mobile and protected capability – and I think people are taking notice of how it fits very well into some of their missions.
DA: Right now, everybody points the finger at Ukraine and says it is changing everything. How influential is it in reality – do you think the ‘lessons learned’ are really being learned – by your customers, rather than by you?
PW: Again, I think it is a little bit of both there. Obviously what’s happening in Ukraine, the way the the conflict has migrated over the last few years, you see a lot of different tactics, techniques and procedures, with different technologies being employed; we’re all watching that to understand how does that influence how and where we operate in a future fight. So I think there’s a lot of that going on and it’s informative.
A lot of decisions impact on R&D – such as counter-UAS capabilities – the scope and breadth of the UAS threat growing to an unprecedented extent. So it brings to the forefront ‘How do you defend against something like that? How can you operate in an environment where you have an extremely expensive vehicle that can be taken out by a very inexpensive drone? And how do we defend against that inexpensive drone without shooting a very expensive munition at it,’ right? Essentially, Ukraine is prompting us to think about how we prepare for a future fight. It is somewhat unique in the way the battle has migrated and I don’t know that we’ll see continued battles like that in the future. But, we would be remiss not to pay attention to it and integrate it into our thinking as we develop technology going forward.
DA: There are proponents of the theory that says this is all about a return to set-piece manoeuvre warfare rather than the expeditionary and counterinsurgency type of operations we have seen in recent years. Where does your long term thinking focus?
PW: That’s a very good question. What we’re really trying to do is align ourselves with where our customers are and where they are going. When you look at the United States Department of War and you look at the National Defense Strategy that was just released, , how do we tweak tech and prepare for that to support our customers and their priorities? On the other hand, we also have a lot of international partners where we’re developing capabilities and trying to figure out how to bring and integrate our mature technologies and capabilities to help solve problems for them as well.
So, it’s a mixture of really not trying to pick which battle to fight, but to partner with our customers to bring technology to help them fight the way they want to fight, if that makes sense.
DA: Perfectly, thank you. Without being too specific, what sort of demand are you seeing for capabilities based on the JLTV platform? You’ve already mentioned counter-UAS: are there other mission sets that that are springing or rising to the top of the tree at the moment?
PW: Absolutely. And the interesting part about the JLTV is the vehicle itself is such an outstanding capability from a mobility and protection standpoint. It’s really a lot like a Swiss army knife and can fill so many different mission roles, if you think about it. It’s already been mentioned in the press, so I won’t get out over my skis too much here, but we are fielding an autonomous version of the JLTV as a mobile weapons platform as part of the Rogue Fires solution for the (US) Marine Corps. That’s a prominent example of modification of the vehicle to meet mission specific needs.
We’ve heard a lot of other demand signals internationally for how do we leverage that autonomous capability – already demonstrated on the JLTV – to fill other missions? How do you make that vehicle either fully autonomous, teleoperated or in a leader-follower configuration for convoy operations. We have also seen demand signals for capabilities such as troop carriers or CASEVAC. So, how do we modify that existing capability and integrate new technologies and capabilities to meet new missions?
All that is above and beyond just the basic integration of counter-UAS or direct fires using larger calibre weapons. So there are a number of different opportunities and really we sit down with our customers and have a conversation. It’s a protected mobility platform, sure – but how do we tweak it for different mission sets? Because it can fill many.
DA: Kind of interestingly, you just partially answered my last question: how much further can you tweak this platform? Is there a realistic limit or have you got, you know, rooms full of people dreaming up new applications to put it on Mars or wherever?
PW: I think it’s all about trade-offs. You can modify a vehicle for extreme use cases. There may be performance impacts or tradeoffs, but how do we counter those trades to fulfill the mission roles? I think JLTV is such a robust platform, however, we can do a lot without having to sacrifice much from a performance standpoint and we’re constantly looking at new ways to partner from a business-to-business standpoint with people with capabilities in areas such as counter-UAS, kinetic and direct fires, for example. It’s really all about understanding the interfaces and understanding the technologies to integrate. We spend a lot of time doing that and partnering with our customer to get there.
DA: And this really is my last question. You’ve got a very eclectic group of user nations, dominated by U.S. forces. Does the current group of users indicate a specific focus of your marketing policy or are they just the people who bit the bullet fastest?
PW: I’d say it’s a little bit of both again. I keep saying that because they’re good questions and you’re hitting the mark. There are many customers interested in the JLTV and the majority of the sales we’ve had so far were through the foreign military sales (FMS) process under our prime contract. So we funneled through and prioritized pulling those capabilities to those countries as they progressed through FMS. But that doesn’t happen without us interfacing with the customer, having conversations to talk about their needs. And where do we go from there? Really, the vehicle sells itself as a capable, protected light mobility platform.
So I think it’s a little bit of both: from a direct commercial standpoint it’s a little bit different in that we’re targeting specific countries who have raised their hand and said, “hey, I have a problem mission set – can you help me?” So we’ve migrated from FMS, since we no longer have the prime (contract) and have tracked to interacting via direct commercial sales channels.
DA: A question that had not occurred to me. Does that make a huge difference to the way that you operate, switching from the FMS channel to a more engaged process? And does it make you more responsive to ‘tweaking’ requests?
PW: I think it simplifies issues when you’re dealing in a commercial sales situation. – so I think it does allow for a little more flexibility and speed. You still get there and you can still do all the same things via either FMS or DCS. The DCS channels tend to be a little quicker, though.
DA: Pat, thanks for your time and for some thought-provoking responses.
Headline image: JLTV in the USMC Rogue Fires configuration. Body images show the Dutch DXPV vehicle and Pat Williams, Chief Program Officer. All images courtesy Oshkosh Defense.
