Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos on Tuesday passionately defended the Amphibious Combat Vehicle’s (ACV) path forward, casting it as the safer, more maneuverable and cheaper alternative to its predecessor, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV).
Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, Amos told the audience that the proliferation of anti-access/area-denial weapons over the past couple decades, coupled with advances in wheeled-vehicle technology, made the EFV obsolete.
He insisted the Marines could build the EFV, which would have been a tracked vehicle that planed across the water, but “it’s not affordable and it does not meet the requirements for today and for tomorrow as it relates to mission and threat.”
The EFV was not the Marines’ first Assault Amphibious Vehicle replacement attempt that was ultimately canceled, but Amos did not characterize the program as a failure. Instead, he said that midway through EFV development it became clear that Marines would need a 100-mile standoff distance for ship-to-shore maneuver instead of the original 25-mile assumption–and the military and industry team could accommodate that with high water speed technology, but not affordably.
“Meanwhile, in the background, unbeknownst to us, industry continued to make great strides in wheeled vehicle maneuverability and protection,” Amos said. “Recognizing this, we altered our view and opened our aperture to see if there were other alternative solutions. These technological advances, coupled with the realities of the A2/AD threat environment and the extreme budget cuts of sequestration, led us in a completely different direction.”
During the question-and-answer session, Amos delved deeper into the differences between the former EFV program and the current phased approach to ACV. ACV Increment 1.1 is in the works now and will consist of a commercial off-the-shelf wheeled vehicle transported ashore via surface connector.
Amos said ACV 1.1 will have the same protection as a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle (MRAP), whereas the flat-bottomed, low-to-the-ground tracked EFV “had probably 25 percent of the protection that these vehicles are going to have, that they already have today.”
The ACV is also more maintainable, cheaper to operate and more reliable than EFV, he said. It is also about a third the cost of EFV, he noted, and in a time of sequestration, “it just didn’t make sense” to pursue the EFV.
Asked about comments from retired Marine officers criticizing the ACV approach, Amos responded, “I actually have a fair amount of information here that I would argue needs to come to the light of day to cause one to realize that, wow, I can do this thing [EFV], I can spend a lot of money, I can buy a vehicle that the American people will not, ladies and gentlemen, will not allow me to send our sons and daughters into combat in,” he said, noting its lack of survivability. “Shame on me if I even were to try. So now I’ve got a vehicle that optimized for 1 percentage of the range of military operations and the rest of it, which is where the vehicle is going to live, is not [optimized].”
EFV grew so expensive as it strove for high water speed, but Amos noted that it would operate in the water less than 10 percent of the time. Instead, ACV is optimized for land operations and has slow water speed capabilities for when it needs to cross bodies of water–and would be carried in on connectors when it needs to come ashore from a ship.
In all, Amos called the EFV a “sub-optimized vehicle safety-wise, personnel comfort-wise, maneuverability-wise, all for a very narrow mission,” he said when talking to reporters after the event.
Amos said he was not sure what the timeline would be for a downselect from the four COTS vehicles the Marine Corps has already tested, but he said there is an “enormous effort underway, a lot of support in Congress and within OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) to get that program moving.”