On October 26, 2006, CENTCOM combined two separate Urgent Universal Needs Statements (UUNS) for 185 and 1000 vehicles, respectively, into a single Joint Universal Operational Needs Statement (JUONS) for 1185 MRAPs. Two weeks later, on November 9, MARCORSYSCOM released the first RFP to industry and on December 6, 2006, officially established the MRAP JPO. Ten manufacturers responded to the proposal and submitted bids. Nine of those manufacturers were subsequently awarded IDIQ7 contracts on January 26, 2007, with immediate production orders for a minimum number of prototype vehicles for testing. Of the nine awarded contracts, two failed to meet contract requirements and were removed from the program prior to testing. The initial test phase started for at least one manufacturer in February 2007 and continued through that April for other
manufacturers. This initial testing, conducted at Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, focused heavily on threshold survivability requirements and eliminated two more manufacturers due to failure in meeting minimum survivability or usability
7 Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ): The indefinite-delivery contract may be used to acquire supplies and/or Services when the exact times and/or exact quantities of future deliveries are not known at the time of contract award. The IDIQ contract offers the following advantages:
Flexibility in both quantities and delivery scheduling
Ordering of supplies or Services after requirements materialize
Indefinite-quantity contracts limit the Government’s obligation to the minimum quantity specified in the contract
Requirements contracts may permit faster deliveries when production lead time is involved, because contractors are usually willing to maintain limited stocks when the Government will obtain all of its actual purchase requirements from the contractor
Indefinite-delivery contracts may provide for any appropriate cost or pricing arrangement. Cost or pricing arrangements that provide for an estimated quantity of supplies or Services (e.g., estimated number of labor hours) must comply with the appropriate procedures (DoD, 2008, p. 396). All MRAP IDIQ contracts were firm-fixed-price (FFP) contracts.
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requirements. The early decision to use multiple manufacturers proved sound because the increasing requirement outpaced the industrial capacity of any one manufacturer to produce that many vehicles. By May 2007, the requirement grew to 7,774 vehicles; by September of that year, the requirement increased again to 15,374.
1. Need Identification
In the months following the March 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, the military transitioned into an occupying force responsible for establishing security and assisting in government reconstruction and nation-building efforts. Shortly thereafter, insurgents turned to the improvised explosive device (IED) as their weapon of choice against US and coalition forces. IEDs were cheap,
unsophisticated, plentiful, easy to employ, and often produced devastating and catastrophic results. By 2005, IED-related casualties were the number one killer in Iraq, prompting the DoD to find a solution.
In 2006, consensus began to form within the Marine Corps and CENTCOM that MRAPs were needed in response to the IED threat. On May 21, 2006, the MNF-W Commander in Iraq submitted an urgent universal need request for 185 MRAP vehicles and followed with another request for 1,000 additional vehicles on July 10, 2006. Designation of these requests as a JUONS by the CENTCOM commander on October 26, 2006, clearly established the warfighters’ need and effectively started the MRAP program.
The perceived reluctance within the DoD to accept the MRAP as a materiel solution to the IED threat is one of the most controversial and criticized aspects of the MRAP program. Such criticisms, however, overlook the escalating actions the DoD took from 2004 through 2006 in response to the numerous escalating threats.
Lieutenant General (Retired) Joseph L. Yakovac, Jr., the former Military Deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology, points out that the DoD undertook numerous initiatives early-on to include
fragmentation kits, up-armored HMMWVs, bar armor, and the JIEDDO in response to the range of threats. In addition, no consensus existed within the user
community, and particularly within the Army, on how to best address the IED threat (personal communication, October 1, 2008). Regardless, the purpose of this research is not to analyze the acquisition process before, but rather to examine the process after the need was validated and the MRAP program was established.
2. Requirement validation
The JUONS designation led to program start-up and release of the first RFP on November 9, 2006, followed shortly thereafter by official establishment of the JPO in December 2006. Figure 3, below, shows the chronology of the requirements validation from the initial 1,185 to the final total of 15,374 vehicles in September 2007. This demonstrates the explosive growth and initial uncertainty as the program transitioned from an ACAT III program to an ACAT ID program and one of the
largest in the DoD.
Figure 3. Chronology of Requirement Validation (Mann, 2008, slide 3)
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On May 2, 2007, the JROC, chaired by Admiral Edmund Giambastiani, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved an MRAP Capability Production Document (CPD), formally setting the size of the required MRAP fleet at 7,774 vehicles. This approval, which precedes procurement actions for standard programs, came less than two months after the military Services detailed their
collective need for MRAP vehicles, an extraordinarily rapid pace in formalizing a new need for a large weapon system program (Sherman, 2007, May 17). Even more extraordinary, however, was that at this point in the MRAP program, testing was underway for seven competing manufacturers, and production contracts had already been awarded to five companies.
B. Program Strategy