The US Army’s prepositioned stock site in Mannheim, Germany, has become the first APS site in the world to receive the new Joint Light Tactical Vehicles that are replacing the Humvee.
The 405th Army Field Support Brigade’s Army Field Support Battalion-Mannheim began receiving the new vehicles about two weeks ago. Compared to the Humvee, JLTVs have a greater survivability rate and a greater payload. They are also more fuel efficient and reliable. Over the course of the next few weeks, AFSBn-Mannheim will receive over 650 JLTVs at its Coleman APS-2 site.
Quentin Rodriguez is the director of supply at the APS-2 site at Coleman. He is responsible for overseeing the accountability of all vehicles and equipment as well as all repair parts, maintenance items and supplies that support the two Armored Brigade Combat Team APS-2 sets located at the site.
“Over the last few days, we’ve been receiving these new JLTVs as part of U.S. Army Sustainment Command’s efforts to refresh and revitalize the APS fleets around the world,” said Rodriquez, who has served with ASC for 13 years and just returned from a two-year tour in Afghanistan. “We’re the first APS site to receive the JLTVs, and we also recently received the new and improved M109 Paladins as well as the latest and greatest M1 Abrams tanks.”
Providing a modernized, technically-superior fleet of vehicles and equipment at the APS site is extremely important to warfighters, said Rodriguez, who served as an engineer on active duty before becoming an Army civilian employee.
“The JLTVs provide a level of survivability that Humvees do not provide,” he said.
Initially, the JLTVs were stored at a holding yard in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where they were manufactured. The JLTVs were transported by cargo liners and transport ships from the US to Bremerhaven, Germany, and are being line hauled by transport trucks to Coleman worksite, their new home as part of the 405th AFSB’s APS-2 program.
“We’re receiving roughly 650 JLTVs over the next three months,” said Rodriguez. “We’re about two weeks into the receiving process, and we’re already starting to de-process many of the vehicles. We’re getting these JLTVs ready to go and starting to install the combat enablers into these vehicles.”
All the APS-2 vehicles are maintained in a configure for combat status, Rodriguez said, so part of process includes taking the JLTVs out of storage for shipment mode and installing the combat enablers – the radios and communications suites as well as the tracking devices commanders use to survey and assess the battlefield.
Once the configuration for combat installs are complete “we’ll do a complete joint inventory with the project manager just to make sure we have all the end items that are needed when we issue these equipment pieces out to the warfighters,” said Rodriguez, a native of Moline, Illinois.
“We’ll then place them into our maintenance fleet and rotate them through, making sure that we keep them at a high readiness posture to where they can roll out the gate and engage at any time,” he said.
The JLTV family of vehicles is an Army-led, joint-service program designed to replace a portion of each service’s light tactical wheeled vehicle fleets while closing an existing capability gap,
