The War Within: The Deal That Saved Oshkosh

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- When Defense Secretary William Gates paid a visit last week to the corporate headquarters of the commercial and military truck maker Oshkosh(OSK Quote), in Wisconsin, he lauded the company's new bomb-busting all-terrain fighting vehicle, which the Pentagon has fast-tracked into service as the war in Afghanistan intensifies.

To an audience of Oshkosh workers, Gates intoned, "With every vehicle you complete, you are saving American lives."

What the secretary didn't mention was that the trucks -- and the multibillion-dollar Army contract to produce them -- might have saved Oshkosh's life as well.

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"It's amazing how rapidly their fortunes have changed," says Loren Thompson, the chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a libertarian-leaning think tank specializing in analysis of what used to be called the military-industrial complex. "They've gone from the edge of Chapter 11 to Valhalla."

Oshkosh won the contract in June and will, when it's all said and done, probably take home from the Pentagon somewhere north of $3.2 billion in revenue. Already, the company has received orders for 6,219 of the trucks, known as M-ATVs (short for MRAP All-Terrain Vehicles, "MRAP" itself being an abbreviation: see below), and will deliver them to the Army through April of next of year at a clip of about 1,000 trucks per month. There's a chance, too, that the military will order more if, for instance, the Obama administration chooses to escalate the war in Afghanistan by adding to troop levels there.