Lemont Furnace, Pa. – Dozens of military vehicles plucked from the battlefields of Iraq stand idle and partly dismantled outside a rural Pennsylvania plant, awaiting mechanics, welders and painters who will prepare them for another tour of duty.
The Bradley Fighting Vehicles, stripped of their treads, scarred and simply worn down from being driven long miles in harsh desert conditions, are the latest of hundreds refurbished or upgraded annually by their maker, BAE Systems – one of many defense contractors whose business has grown throughout five years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
BAE Systems has seen its Brad ley business roughly double since the start of the Iraq war in 2003, and, like many defense companies, is poised to benefit further as the military replaces, repairs or upgrades combat equipment used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last year, the military began shipping thousands of Humvees, helicopters, tanks and other pieces of equipment from Iraq to the United States to be rebuilt.
Another major defense contractor, General Dynamics Corp., has been awarded contracts to overhaul hundreds of its Abrams tanks since 2004, said Tom Peterson, the company’s M1A2 Abrams program manager. It has also established a major repair depot in the Middle East for its eight- wheeled Stryker troop carriers.
Other defense companies doing refurbishment work include the Boeing Co., the Chicago-based maker of Apache and Chinook helicopters; Lockheed Martin Corp., the Bethesda, Md.-based F-16 fighter-jet manufacturer; and L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., a New York-based maker of specialized communications systems.
BAE Systems was already refurbishing or upgrading the vehicles, built between 1981 and the mid-1990s, before the Iraq war began. The Army has about 4,500 of the vehicles.
The work largely entails basic automotive work . Relatively few show signs of combat damage.
Andy Hove, director of the company’s Bradley Combat Systems division, said a typical Bradley might have been driven between 800 and 1,000 miles per year before the war but might cover as many as 10,000 miles per year in Iraq.
As a result, they need to be refurbished more frequently.
This warehouse-size plant about 40 miles southwest of Pittsburgh has been receiving as many as 500 Bradleys annually from an Army depot in Texas. The company later sends them to a larger BAE Systems facility in York, Pa., for reassembly and testing.
Inside the Fayette County facility, a roof-mounted crane lifts a gun turret out of a Bradley and gently carries it to another part of the floor. Workers crawl around the aluminum shells of some vehicles, drilling fresh holes or welding on brackets that eventually will hold new equipment. Some Bradleys are still clad in thick steel armor.
Like many employees at the plant, Joe Snyder has military experience. An Army National Guard reservist, he was deployed to Iraq for about nine months last year.
“I know where these vehicles are going, and I know what they’re going to be put through,” he said.
The company disassembles the Bradleys, overhauls their salvageable parts and rebuilds them.
Other Bradleys are remanufactured or upgraded to newer specifications.
