Sustainment contracts for the Pentagon’s fleet of tactical wheeled vehicles probably isn't the sexiest topic out there, but when it comes to the brand-new M-ATVs currently making their way to the Afghanistan theater, they're worth talking about.

The contracts being awarded to M-ATV manufacturer Oshkosh reflect some critical lessons learned in the Pentagon’s rush to ship 16,000 MRAPs to Iraq and Afghanistan. After spending $26 billion on various MRAP contracts—a number that doesn’t include sustainment and repair bills—the Pentagon is getting a jump on future sustainment contracts when the M-ATVs need repairs.

The MRAP repair and upgrade contracts are a huge—and escalating—cost that hasn’t received a lot of attention. Navistar recently received a contract totaling $78 million to be paid over the next four years for new hardware and vehicle enhancements on its fleet of MaxxPro MRAPs. Earlier this year, ManTech International Corp. was awarded a contract for $355 million for “rapid repair requirements for the Army's fleet of RG31 and RG33 MRAPs,” and a quick search turns up more than $100 million spent on sustainment on the RG-31 MRAP alone over the past several years. On top of this, Oshkosh has received $190 million in contracts to replace the suspension systems on 2,500 Cougar and RG-33 MRAPs already in Afghanistan with their more durable TAK-4 independent suspension system.

While these somewhat buried costs are cumbersome, continuous, and ad hoc, the Department of Defense decided to go a different route with the $2.7 billion M-ATV contract with Oshkosh. According to R. Andy Hove, President of Oshkosh Defense, sustainment costs were included in the original contract, and the company is busily working to field both the vehicle and the extra parts kits and trainers that are being shipped along with them. The company has already received a $16 million contract for spare parts as well as a $12 million order for field service representative support in Afghanistan. “We’re providing both rollover trainers and drivers trainers,” Hove says, adding that the rollover trainers have already been deployed in theater. “That was one of the lessons learned from the original MRAP program,” he tells Ares, adding that “much closer attention was paid to spare parts availability and training prior to deployment” than had been with previous vehicle contracts.

Oshkosh is also sending about twenty repair and replacement kits a month to Afghanistan along with the 1,000 M-ATVs it ships, Hove says, adding that each kit has over 150 parts “that range from everything from the front hood to engine hoses.” But don't let the  description of the replacement packages as “kits” mislead you--it “takes three semi truck loads to transport” each kit Hove says. Once the teams on the ground start going through those initial spares, the demand history for each part will be recorded, since the parts are encoded with National Stock Numbers so that every service can order their M-ATV spares through their own logistics system. Hove said that they’re doing this so the services won’t have to “stand up an ad hoc system that doesn’t fit into the overall DoD logistics system.” All this doesn’t mean that repair costs will necessarily be less than they have been in the past, but the process will at least be more orderly, and easier to track, than previous rush orders.