Houston Chronicle

With a December deadline looming on a military contract worth billions, area officials are making increasingly high-profile efforts to keep the contract in Texas.

At stake is the line of 50,000-pound armored tactical vehicles called the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles, or FMTV.

For the last 17 years, they have been manufactured at a mammoth plant in Sealy, about an hour west of Houston.

In August, the Sealy plant, owned by BAE Systems, lost a bidding war for the continued contract to a Wisconsin-based competitor.

Now Texas officials are protesting that the Pentagon withdrew an existing contract from a manufacturer with no documented complaints and awarded it to a contractor that has not previously built the line vehicles.

On Monday, U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, whose district includes Sealy, led a public protest with about 50 BAE employees and economic development leaders in front of Minute Maid Park.

They lined up a row of armored trucks outside the $250 million stadium to make a point: Losing the FMTV contract would cost the Houston area an estimated $1.8 billion, or seven Minute Maid Parks, per year.

"We're going to take this fight to Washington, and we're going to win this fight," McCaul said.

He and Gov. Rick Perry have written to Defense Secretary Robert Gates, arguing that the Pentagon overlooked BAE's record and didn't see flaws in the bidding process in awarding the contract to its competitor, the Oshkosh Corp., which submitted a lower bid.

The investigative arm of Congress, the Government Accountability Office, is studying the decision and will release its findings on Dec. 14.

It could recommend that the contract be reinstated in Sealy.