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Nearly four years after the Army settled on Oshkosh to produce a next-generation replacement for the troubled Humvee, a few lucky soldiers from the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division are finally going to get their paws on the much-hyped Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

On Monday, the Raider Brigaide's official Twitter account posted photos of flatbed trucks hauling the new JLTV rolling up at Fort Stewart in Georgia.

In December, the Army announced that the Raider Brigaide would receive a total of 500 JLTVs by the end of March.

“We are very excited to get these trucks into the hands of our Soldiers,” 1st ABCT commander Col. Mike Adams said in an Army release. “It's an honor to be chosen as the first unit to receive such an improved capability, and I look forward to getting it into our formations.”

It's worth noting that fielding the JLTV to the 1st ABCT represents a departure from thee Army's initial plan to field the first batch of the vehicles to an infantry brigade combat team with the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, New York. The Army did not immediately respond to requests for comment regarding the change.

The Marine Corps also initially planned to equip an infantry battalion with II Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina with 69 JLTVs, while both the Air Force and U.S. Special Operations Command were considering adopting the vehicles to their security forces and special tactics teams, respectively.

The Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) Family of Vehicles is a U.S. Army-led, Joint acquisition modernization program with the Marine Corps
(U.S. Army photo)

The arrival of the JLTV was highly anticipated long before the Army finalized its Oshkosh contract in 2015. Initiated in 2005, the program was designed to develop an armored vehicle with a higher survivability rate than the beleaguered Humvee that proved ridiculously incapable of handling heavy combat in the early years of the Global War on Terror.

Indeed, Oshkosh hyped up the JLTV's advantages over the Humvee when the company showed off two new variants of the vehicle on the floor of the Associated of the United States Army's annual expo in Washington in October 2017.

“My son is of the age where he could join the military,” Dave Diersen, vice president and general manager of joint programs at Oshkosh, told Task & Purpose at the time. “If he was assigned to an up-armored Humvee, I'd say go to Canada or go to jail.”

SEE ALSO: How The Humvee Failed On The Battlefield And Sparked A Culture War Back Home

WATCH NEXT: The JLTV In Action

Jared Keller
Jared Keller

Jared Keller is the former managing editor of Task & Purpose. His writing has appeared in Aeon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the New Republic, Pacific Standard, Smithsonian, and The Washington Post, among other publications. Contact the author here.

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