Wow, a good spirited thread.
The only reason we recognize "Jeep" as a brand name is because of a government procurement contract for a light utility military vehicle ca. 1938. The Bantam Motor Company had the best design, but Kaiser Motors and Ford were selected to build Bantam's design, because the government had concerns about how Bantam could make production targets. Kaiser Motors got the post-WWII rights to the Jeep and Kaiser Motors eventually got absorbed into American Motors, which eventually went to Chrysler. Chrysler, of course, went broke in the early 1980s, but Lee Iacocca convinced the House and Senate to bail them out.
That's not to say that Ford gave up on the military light utility vehicle market. In the 1960s, Ford had the M-151, which, if a reasonable person could actually believe, was a more dangerous vehicle than the old WWII MB Jeep. There were more servicemen killed in motor vehicle accidents with the M-151 than any military vehicle ever built.
I'm sure that Mitt "Gordon Gecko" Romney knows that, since his dad ran American Motors. But all is fair in presidential elections, and Mitt can claim whatever it takes to try to win the Presidency, and establish wards and tithing in middle America.
All good stories come to an end, and Ford sold their M-151 chassis design to AM General in the early 1970s to build mail trucks for the Postal Service, so no good deed goes unpunished. And AM General became the company that developed the Humvee.
The moral of the story is, there's always lots of money to be made off government contracts.
Some things never change.