The Humvee’s Replacement Is Dead — The Army Just Quit the JLTV

The US Army spent billions replacing the Humvee with the JLTV, then quit buying it and handed the production line to the company that built the Humvee. Here is how that happened. The Humvee was never meant for this. AM General won the production contract on March twenty two, 1983, and built a light utility truck with no armour and no mine protection in the specification. More than 280,000 were produced. Then roadside bombs in Iraq turned a flat floored utility vehicle into a casualty problem, and improvised explosive devices accounted for roughly 48 percent of American deaths there. On December 8, 2004, at Camp Buehring in Kuwait, Specialist Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team asked Donald Rumsfeld why soldiers were digging through landfills for scrap metal to armour their own vehicles. Rumsfeld's answer, that you go to war with the army you have, became one of the defining quotes of the war. The hillbilly armour that followed added thousands of pounds to a chassis never designed for it, and rollovers killed 60 of the 85 soldiers lost in Humvee accidents in Iraq between 2003 and 2005. The Pentagon answered with the MRAP, nearly 28,000 vehicles for roughly 47 billion dollars, then with the lighter Oshkosh M-ATV, and finally with the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. Oshkosh won the JLTV on August 25, 2015, with a contract worth 6,749,799,374 dollars and 25 cents for the first 16,901 trucks against a plan for nearly 55,000. Then the irony. On February 9, 2023, AM General, the Humvee company, won the follow on production contract worth 8.66 billion dollars. Two years later the Army Transformation Initiative cancelled Army procurement of both the Humvee and the JLTV. The Marine Corps, which was not consulted, is still buying. So is the Air Force. And the Army is spending its money instead on the Infantry Squad Vehicle, an unarmoured nine seat truck built on a Chevrolet Colorado, because in a drone war armour cannot hide. This video covers the full story: the Humvee's design origins, the IED crisis and hillbilly armour, the MRAP and M-ATV, the JLTV competition and the Lockheed Martin protest, the AM General recompete, the 2025 cancellation, and the Army's pivot back to light, cheap and fast. Subscribe for more deep dives into the armoured vehicles that shaped modern war. #Humvee #JLTV #USArmy