Oshkosh Truck Corporation [NYSE:OSK] received a $30.6 million contract award from the U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command, to deliver 100 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle program within four months. The vehicles are categorized as “Category I” intended for urban operations and referred to as the Mine Resistant Utility Vehicle (MRUV).
The vehicle proposed by Oshkosh Truck is the Alpha, designed by Protected Vehicles, Inc. (PVI) of North Charleston, South Carolina. Oshkosh and PVI have forged a relationship in the past year to pursue business opportunities related to armored vehicles. PVI will produce the armored hulls, outfitted with their advanced armor technology, while Oshkosh will provide the production capability and engineering expertise to provide completed vehicles with the performance, reliability, and quality standards to meet tactical operations requirements. Oshkosh and PVI are also cooperating on a parallel MRAP contract, teaming with Israeli armor specialist, RAFAEL, for the production of MRAP Category II variant, called Golan.
The ALPHA is a 13 ton 4×4 vehicle designed to be an economical path to superior blast and ballistic protection for the US Military. When coupled with PVI’s ShieldAll armoring solution (developed under cooperation with Battelle) the vehicle exceeds highly desired protection levels with minimal impact to payload and performance capabilities. Standalone, ShieldAll has multi-hit protection capability against 7.62AP threats at one-third the weight of armored steel. Alpha has can accomodate eight occupants. It has a v-shaped hull and is designed to meet or exceed all ballistic and mine protection capabilities specified under the MRAP requirement. The vehicle is also fully air-transportable, making it simpler to re-deploy once in theater.
