The Humvee is designed

1979 – 1983

The requirement: In 1979 the Army set out to replace two aging light vehicles — the M151 jeep and the M561 Gama Goat — with a single high-mobility multipurpose wheeled vehicle: a 1.25-ton truck family in several configurations, wide, low, and able to keep up with the new generation of armored vehicles. AM General began preliminary design work on the vehicle that became the M998 series in July 1979. The designing was done by the company whose trucks had replaced nothing of its own design before — the specialist history notes that everything AM General and its predecessors had built to that point, the Reo-designed 2½-tons, the International-designed 5-tons, the Ford-designed M151, had been designed by someone else. The Humvee was the company's own.

The competition: In July 1981 the Army awarded prototype contracts to three firms — AM General, Chrysler Corporation's defense arm, and Teledyne Continental — for eleven prototypes each, delivered by May 1982 and put through trials that the reference accounts total at more than 600,000 miles in desert and arctic conditions. One naming variant is printed as it stands: the Government Accountability Office's report on the program names the second competitor as General Dynamics Land Systems, the successor name of Chrysler Defense; the reference histories say Chrysler. The prototypes were the same competition under both names.

Sources:

1. Humvee reference history — July 1979 preliminary design, the July 1981 prototype contracts and eleven prototypes per firm, the trial mileage.
2. U.S. Government Accountability Office, report NSIAD-84-136 (12 June 1984) — the competitor named as General Dynamics Land Systems.
3. Military Trader (Doyle), "The Birth of AM General" — the company's prior production had all been to other firms' designs.