AM General

AM General builds the light tactical trucks that the US Army and Marine Corps drive, and it has done so under one name or another since 1971. The business grew out of the Jeep operations that passed through Willys, Kaiser and American Motors before becoming a standalone defense manufacturer. The company sits in South Bend, Indiana with manufacturing in nearby Mishawaka, and has been owned by the New York private equity firm KPS Capital Partners since July 2020. Its history is more tangled than most defense manufacturers because for two decades it also ran a civilian business, building the Hummer H2 until 2009 and assembling the Mercedes-Benz R-Class until 2017. That work is finished. What remains is a tactical vehicle house with an unusually large installed base to feed.

The HUMVEE is the reason the name is known. Something over a quarter of a million have been built since the 1980s and they remain in service with the US forces and with dozens of allied militaries, which means the product line today is as much about reconfiguring and recapitalising existing trucks as it is about new hulls. The current catalogue is organised around crew size rather than around the old alphanumeric model codes. The two-crew HUMVEE 2-CT comes in a SECM maintenance support configuration, a Hawkeye MHS variant carrying a mobile howitzer system, and an ambulance for casualty evacuation. The four-crew HUMVEE 4-CT is offered in a standard configuration, as a Fastback, and as an Armoured Fastback TOW carrying anti-tank missiles. Underneath all of them sits the HUMVEE 13-Series Chassis, sold as a platform for customers who want to integrate their own body or mission kit. MIMIC-V is a partner vehicle offered alongside the core range for transport and light defense roles.

The second pillar arrived in February 2023, when the US Army handed AM General a production contract worth more than 8.66 billion dollars for the next generation Joint Light Tactical Vehicle. The award covered roughly 20,682 JLTV A2 vehicles and 9,883 trailers, and it took the programme away from Oshkosh Defense, which had designed and built the original. The A2 is a lighter and less expensive development of the original vehicle aimed at the same protected mobility role. Winning a recompete on a rival's design is rare in US ground vehicles and it reset the company's production planning for the rest of the decade. Around the vehicles sits a sustainment business covering spare parts, kits, field service, technical publications and depot-level recapitalisation, which is the quieter half of the revenue and the reason the HUMVEE fleet is still running forty years on. The site also groups a set of advanced technologies activities under a Future Driven banner, though the company publishes little detail on what sits inside it. The company has also started looking outward. In June 2026 it signed a strategic partnership with India's Kalyani Strategic Systems at Eurosatory covering artillery cannon development.