Marines Eye Ground Vehicles, Budget In MindTough economic realities looming in defense spending are casting a shadow over U.S. Marine Corps plans for its ground tactical fleet, which will likely soon see orders trimmed or possibly scrapped.
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Every program in the corps’ fleet, from Humvees to marine personnel carriers (MPC), is under service scrutiny in the wake of Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s announcement that he intends to cut $100 billion from the defense budget over the next five years. While most of the cuts are predicted to come from personnel, the corps is bracing for its own contribution, including reductions in vehicle programs.
“Fiscal resources will be reduced and drive reductions in Marine Corps end-strength, equipment and modernization,” writes Gen. James Conway, the commandant, in a report outlining a force structure review that was circulated internally among commanders in August. The review is to conclude Dec. 17.
Leaders worry that the planned vehicle force will be too heavy for expeditionary operations. “The current table of equipment . . . is too heavy for amphibious shipping,” Conway states in the report, a copy of which was obtained by DTI. “We should expect to continue to be postured forward aboard Navy ships, immediately operationally available,” he said later.
The Force Structure Review Group’s assessment of the corps’ needs will become a baseline for vehicle inventory management, explains Christopher Yunker, head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command’s Counter Mobility section in Quantico, Va. “We recognize that we’ve got to reduce the inventory,” he says, noting that the corps’ fleet of 43,000 vehicles is expected to be reduced to 32,600. “Our view is that every capability set probably has a contribution to that vehicle reduction.”
Central to future vehicle plans is acquisition of a new fleet of complementary armored vehicles: the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV), medium-weight MPC and heavy Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV). The advent of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAP), however, could prove to be a game-changer.
“The MRAP was an unplanned expenditure,” says Dakota Wood, defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The Marine Corps finds itself in this somewhat awkward position of possessing vehicles it didn’t initially ask for and yet also trying to figure out where it needs to go in the future.”
The service plans to whittle its 3,300 MRAPs to about 2,500, which will be for specialty units, such as explosive ordnance disposal and route reconnaissance teams. A brigade’s worth of the vehicles will likely be tucked into storage, “to use should we find ourselves 15 years from now in another Iraq,” Yunker adds. The rest could be dispersed to other services.
“It’s fair to say [MRAP possession] puts pressure on the entire portfolio,” says Yunker, who led development of the corps’ ground combat vehicle strategy. “The MRAP certainly has its role in our vehicle strategy. Our plan is to use the MRAPs for exactly what they were designed for.”
The rapid emergency buy of MRAPs in recent years, however, is potentially leading to redundancy in utility, according to government auditors, who have also had their eyes on Defense Department tactical wheeled vehicle capabilities. Last year, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) pointed to the capability overlap created by the $21-billion MRAP acquisition program, and $6-billion M-ATV (MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle) buy in recent years, and the forthcoming JLTV.
The M-ATV, a smaller version of the MRAP with the maneuverability of a Humvee, is proving to be a good platform for the corps, according to Yunker. Despite the utility, it’s “a 30,000-lb. vehicle trying to replace the 12,000-lb. Humvee,” he says. “We’ve got to get them over on the boat, and that’s part of the tension we find ourselves in.”
Despite the weight issues, the need for the JLTV will override major changes to the program, according to a Marine Corps official. “Both [the Army and the Marine Corps] still continue to fully support the JLTV program,” says Lt. Col. Casey Travers, program manager for the JLTV, who says he doesn’t sense that the Humvee replacement is on the chopping block. “Multiple services needing the same capability will help in cases when they look at programs to be canceled due to funding availability,” he says.
The JLTV’s heft is in part due to design modifications that incorporated lessons learned from MRAP, which has in turn driven up the price tag to about $500,000 per vehicle, according to Wood. Humvees, by comparison, cost $150,000-200,000. The JLTV was never meant to fully replace the Humvee, and doing so now would double or triple the cost of the wheeled vehicle fleet, he says.
“They can’t go JLTV pure,” Wood adds. “I think it’s reasonable to expect that within the next several years, the Marine Corps will continue to work with its existing fleet of Humvees.”
The Internally Transportable Vehicle (ITV), the expeditionary jeep-sized vehicle designed to fit in the belly of an MV-22 Osprey, and which reached initial operational capability in 2009, is also expected to face scrutiny due to a high price comparable to the JLTV. “In today’s fiscal environment, you have to present a strong case for why you should buy a hyper-specialized piece of equipment that is extremely expensive,” Wood says.
The internal corps review could spell out the fate once and for all of the Marines’ most vulnerable program, the EFV, a program almost 30 years in the making that is fraught with cost overruns and delays. In July, the GAO concluded that the EFV’s “history of cost growth, schedule slips and performance failures and the current challenges (including changing threats) raise the question of whether the business case for the program (in terms of cost, schedule and performance) is still sound.” The corps, however, contends it needs the ship-to-shore assault vehicle—able to achieve 25 kt. on the water and now costing almost $20 million each—to replace the aged fleet of Amphibious Assault Vehicles (AAVs).
Defense leadership, however, isn’t convinced about the $12-billion program and has set the stage in recent months for major cutbacks—or for cutting it out altogether. In May, Gates said Marine planners needed to take a “hard look” at the necessity of major amphibious landing capabilities in the 21st century.
Conway, arguably the EFV’s most vocal supporter, has himself begun to dial back enthusiasm for the program. “It has been a beleaguered program, I think it’s fair to say,” Conway remarked at a Pentagon briefing in August. “We are looking at affordability of the program in the out years. If you believe there will be cuts to the defense budget, we have to ask ourselves, are 573 affordable?”
The corps is wedded to the capability, not to the platform, Conway noted in the August briefing. “And it’s my belief that if that program were canceled outright, we would still be looking to come up with that capability in some other context, because it is essential to the way we do business.”
According to Wood, Gates’ and Conway’s comments indicate they are pulling back support of the EFV, based on the change in strategic operational threat and budgetary constraints. Should the corps gut the program, the current AAVs, which have been in the fleet almost 40 years, could likely squeeze out up to 20 years of service with refurbishment, Wood believes.
The current AAV fleet has been a “tremendous asset” to the corps, but it is an aging vehicle, cautions Manny Pacheco, spokesman for the EFV Program Office. “I don’t know how much blood you can suck out of a rock,” he adds. “I think at the end of the day, if this program were to suffer those consequences, the Marine Corps has to look hard at how much money it can afford to sink into AAVs to keep them afloat until it finds an alternative.”
Yunker agrees, saying that a move to kill the EFV program would translate into a loss of 10-15 years in program development. “You’d have a risk window that would open up,” he says.