No, not that! Don’t be juvenile.
Militaries around the world use vehicles. In the 21st Century, that should be obvious, but the range of the vehicles military forces – and their irregular counterparts – use covers a very wide spectrum. What usually makes the nightly news are vehicles like main battle tanks, various classes of APC’s, and small “tactical” vehicles that all look like they were given massive shots of steroids and testosterone.
More rarely, you may see military cargo trucks, carrying anonymous crates of “military stuff”, vaguely termed “cargo” or “supplies”. If you’re very lucky, you might see some sort of construction vehicle, similar to those you may see working on road repaid during your daily commute, albeit the military vehicles are probably painted in “Army Green”.
But, there is another class of vehicle, rarely spotted (or paid attention to) by news crews, humble little heroes that slog along in the background, mostly ignored because they appear so plain next to their more military-looking cousins…those are the COTS vehicles.
Military ground vehicles have unique requirements that civilian vehicles do not need. Military vehicles require at least some level of armor protection for their crews and passengers, as well as needing to be massively built to absorb both the recoil of heavy weapons and the impacts from bullets and shell fragments. Their drive-trains and suspension systems need to be far heavier and more robust than civilian vehicles, and their electrical systems need to be much larger, the better to handle the much heavier load of electronic equipment that most military vehicles carry – in militaries that plan for electronic and nuclear warfare, the electrical systems also need shielding against Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) – to name just a few.
Clearly civilian vehicles require few, if any, of these very heavy and very expensive systems.
However, military bases (as we have pointed out previously) very much resemble small towns. As a result, in addition to all of the specifically military vehicles needed, there are a host of functions that require vehicles, but not vehicles requiring the heavy and expensive features outlined above.
When a military identifies such a need, the smart move is to turn to the civilian sector. This is concept is called “Commercial, Off-The-Shelf”, or C.O.T.S.
In the early 1970’s, as the Vietnam War ground to its conclusion, it became painfully clear to the United States military that its faithful little warrior, the much-loved “Jeep”, was nearing the end of its service life. Requirements were changing, and the little vehicles were simply no longer equal to the task. Thus, the Pentagon began development of a new light vehicle in 1970 that would eventually become the High Mobility, Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), now known as the “Hummer”.
The problem? The Hummer would not enter service for over a decade…but the M151 Jeeps would not last that long. A new idea was needed – and that idea was a COTS program to buy civilian pickup trucks as a “short-term” solution.
And thus, the CUCV was born.
In 1976, the Pentagon began buying a “militarized” version of the Dodge D200 and W200 pickup truck models; eventually, the Pentagon would buy c.44,000 vehicles, designated the M880- (W200) and M890-series (D200); they were termed, in classical military lingo, “Civilian Utility Cargo Vehicles”, hence, “CUCV”. These early batches of vehicles were very basic civilian pickup trucks, essentially car-lot models painted “Army Green”. There were a few minor additions, however.
While most vehicles had a conventional 12-volt electrical system, some models added a 24-volt system to handle an increased electrical draw for more electrical equipment. That 24-volt addition came at a cost, however, because the 24-volt system took up the space needed for a power steering pump, making them rather difficult to drive in rough terrain and snow. Their engines were also gasoline-powered, in a military that ran mostly on diesel.
The M880/890 vehicles, all of them models from 1976 and 1977, have had a long – and continuing – service life, although the vast majority have long since been either scrapped or sold off as surplus, as more and more Hummers came online.
But, that wasn’t the end of the CUCV program. This was because the M880/890 series was so successful, the military wanted to make lightning strike twice…so, beginning in 1983, the Pentagon went to General Motors, and handed them a set of requirements based on its experience with the Dodge vehicles.
The result was the “M10XX”-series vehicles.
Starting with a standard Chevrolet K5 Blazer chassis, the M1008 and its derivatives were all uprated to a 1¼ ton capacity, or higher, and were equipped with the GM 6.2lt J6 Detroit Diesel V8 engine. The main modification, however, was a hybrid 12/24-volt electrical system, running two 12-volt batteries and two 12-volt/100 amp alternators. The vehicles also came equipped with a NATO-standard 24-volt slave cable jumper connection, to provide jumps for 24-volt vehicles. The Pentagon would eventually purchase over 70,000 of the M10XX-series, a vehicle count rivaled only by the M113-series APC.
Beginning in 1987, the US Air Force began buying limited numbers of what became known as the CUCV II. These vehicles were all based on the Chevrolet C/K, Tahoe, and Suburban models, and were “militarized” in a manner similar to the previous M100XX-series. As well, following the adoption of U.S. Army Regulation 750-1, these vehicles all received the Chemical Agent Resistant Coating (CARC) coating, which provided enhanced protection against nuclear, biological and chemical threats; while some of the earlier types of CUCV were repainted with CARC material, most of the older models were surplused before receiving the updated paint.
Although produced from 1987 to 2000, the CUCV II vehicles were never procured in large numbers. Beginning in 2001, another small order was placed for a new CUCV-type program, called the Light Service Support Vehicle (LSSV).
The LSSV is a GM-built Chevrolet Silverado 1500, Chevrolet Silverado 2500 HD, Chevrolet Tahoe, or Chevrolet Suburban that are powered by a Duramax 6.6 liter turbo diesel engine. In 2005, LSSV production switched to AM General, a unit of MacAndrews and Forbes Holdings.
Like all of the CUCV models, the LSSV is intended for non-combat duties, like base services and maintenance, military police patrol, light cargo and monitoring functions. With the rise of the “combat technical”, however – and especially in light of the US Army’s awful infantry squad vehicle concept – the notion of possibly revisiting the CUCV concept as an active combat vehicle is not as outrageous an idea as it would have been fifteen or twenty years ago.
Sometimes, the dedicated military design process fails. When that happens, innovation will step in, if allowed…and, almost always, in a more cost-effective manner.
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