Majority of US MRAPs To Be Scrapped or Stored
WASHINGTON — The US Army estimates it will need to spend $1.7 billion in supplemental wartime dollars over the next several years to modernize and retain 8,585 mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, while divesting itself of another 7,456 MRAPs it no longer needs.
But the majority of those the service will keep will be mothballed in prepositioned stocks, according to an internal Army document.
Even with thousands of vehicles sitting in warehouses awaiting the next conflict, the MRAPs that will remain in the force represent only one third of the 25,000the Pentagon bought since 2007, costing $50 billion.
Since it was a rapid acquisition program, the Defense Department had no long-term plans for the platform, and the Army and Marine Corps have been wrestling with what to do with the 25 variants in their fleets.
Saddled with so many expensive, hulking vehicles bought solely as a wartime contingency, the services are getting rid of as many MRAPs as possible — even going so far as to shred thousands in Afghanistan instead of sending them home. The military is selling the shredded metal parts to local Afghans for scrap.
But the MRAPs the service is keeping won’t come home cheaply. In addition to the $1.7 billion in overseas contingency operations (OCO) funds to be spent by the end of 2016, the Army anticipates it will require $17.6 million in base funding in fiscal 2016 and 2017 to complete the work, according to service briefing slides obtained by Defense News.
Dated Dec. 2, the slides outline Army thinking about what will be required in fiscal 2016-2020 to fund its programs of record. Army officials said they were unable to comment on the documents by press time.
The documents are part of the annual weapons systems review that all programs endure when officials put together the program objective memorandum budgets that look out five years.
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So, what will the Army get for that money?
A full 5,036 of the 8,585 MRAPs the Army plans to keep will be stored in prepositioned stocks all over the world, with another 1,073 assigned for training activities. The remainder will be spread among the active force.
The Army will keep 5,651 Oshkosh-produced MRAP all-terrain vehicles (M-ATVs) out of the 8,700 DoD has bought since 2009, along with 2,633 Navistar-made MaxxPro Dash vehicles and 301 MaxxPro ambulances.
The M-ATV is smaller and more maneuverable than the original MRAP variants and was rapidly fielded once the Pentagon’s focus shifted to Afghanistan in 2009. The dirt roads, narrow mountain passes and weak bridges could not handle the size and weight of most MRAPs, leading to a quick fix that ended up being the variant the Army most wants to keep.
The Army is getting rid of thousands of Cougars developed by General Dynamics/Force Protection, some MaxxPro models from Navistar Defense, and several Caiman models from BAE Systems.
And the price to reset the vehicles isn’t cheap. The service estimates spending about $150,000 to reset each vehicle at the Red River Army Depot in Texas, and about $87,000 per vehicle at Livorno, Italy — the two depots that will see the majority of the work over the next three years.
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