US Marines Face Decision on Attempting to Develop Amphibious Combat Vehicle

Marine Commandant James Amos must make a tough call this year on a program that will define the future Marine Corps: whether to develop and buy the Amphibious Combat Vehicle.

“The Commandant considers a replacement craft for his aging AAV7 Amphibious Tractor to be his number-one priority,” said Gen. Amos’s spokesman, Lt. Col. David Nevers, in an email to me this morning. “He will soon make a decision on the future of the ACV.”

The Marines come ashore from ships and fight their way inland from the beaches. That is what they believe is their military DNA. That’s why ACV is the commandant’s number one priority,

While it may be his top weapons system issue, we aren’t sure how soon “soon” will be. Nevers declined to define it. Given that Gen. Amos didn’t receive the in-depth analysis of aldternatives of ACV options until November, it’s unlikely he can make the much-deferred decision in time to affect the administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2015, theoretically due out next month. (Or he’s made a decision and doesn’t want to telegraph it, which would give time for contractors etc. to influence the decision.)

The Amphibious Combat Vehicle is meant to replace the aging and vulnerable Amphibious Assault Vehicle, aka the LVPT-7, which entered service in 1971, ceased production in the early 1980s, and fought with mixed success in Afghanistan and Iraq. The AAV, in turn, is the successor of the famous World War II Amtrac, which revolutionized the military role of the Marine Corps. In layman’s terms, these are swimming tanks that carry Marine Corps foot troops – 24 in the AAV — over water, onto the beach, and deep inland.

The Marines tried to replace the AAV before, with the ambitious Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. EFV was essentially a water-skiing, transforming tank, able to skim over the water like a speedboat at 30 miles per hour — three times as fast as the AAV — and then reconfigure itself for combat ashore. The idea was a troop transport so fast and long-ranged that Navy ships could launch it from 25 miles offshore, beyond the range of coastal anti-ship cruise missile (ASCM) launchers. But missile ranges got longer, the EFV got more expensive, and the program was cancelled by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2011. Ever since, Gen. Amos and the Marine Corps have labored to come up with an alternative.

The Marines face a dilemma with no easy answer. Amos has essentially three options: go high, go low, or go slow.

Go high: a high-speed ACV that meets the ambitious performance goals the Marines hold dear — which critics will immediately declare to be too expensive and doomed to meet the same fate as the cancelled EFV.

Go low: a lower-speed ACV that reduces performance to keep down costs – which critics will immediately argue is too marginal an improvement over the existing AAV to spend money on.

Go slow: a delayed ACV that spends more time in research and development in the hopes of reconciling high speed and low cost — or at least waiting out the current budget crunch.

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