By Emelie Rutherford
The Marine Corps is moving forward with plans for the once-troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), which recently overcame a hurdle with the Pentagon’s Defense Acquisition Board (DAB) that clears the way for redesigned prototypes.
Some pundits have speculated the developmental armored amphibious vehicle–which has faced cost and engineering challenges–could take a hit in the Obama Pentagon’s forthcoming fiscal year 2010 budget proposal or Quadrennial Defense Review. The Marine Corps has been very vocal early this year in support of General Dynamics‘ [GD] delayed EFV, which is intended to quickly carry 17 combat-equipped Marines inland from ships more than 20 miles offshore.
The DAB has agreed with an Overarching Integrated Product Team (OIPT) review, conducted by varied EFV officials last December, which examined the results of a major Critical Design Review (CDR) held earlier that month, a Marine Corps Land Systems spokesman said.
“In late January, the DAB concurred with the Overarching Integrated Product Team review of the EFV CDR results which now pave the way for the construction of the first of seven EFV prototypes to be manufactured at the Joint Services Manufacturing Center in Lima, Ohio,” spokesman David Branham said last Thursday.
The CDR last December looked at design-for-reliability efforts that grew out of a program restructuring. The CDR “assessed the EFV design as mature with a predicted reliability estimate of…61 hours Mean Time Between Operational Mission Failures (MTBOMF), greatly exceeding the exit criteria of…43.5 hours,” Branham said.
The Marine Corps awarded General Dynamics a $766.8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee System Design and Development-2 (SDD-2) contract in late July 2008. The contract, which reflects a do-over of the SDD arrangement reached in 2001, calls for the company to build seven reconfigured EFV prototypes and modify existing vehicles. Work is expected to be completed September 2012, states an Aug. 1, 2008 contract announcement.
Following the DAB decision, assuming plans don’t change, Branham said: “The first new EFV prototype is expected to roll off the assembly line in March 2010.”
Lawmakers have scrutinized the EFV, which failed in 2006 to meet reliability requirements in a pre-production operational assessment and suffered a Nunn-McCurdy cost breach in 2007. Reps. Gene Taylor (D-Miss.) and Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.), the chairman of House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee and ranking member of the committee’s Air and Land Forces subcommittee, have criticized underbelly-armor plans for the vehicle.
Marine Commandant Gen. James Conway told defense reporters Jan. 23 the service is “optimistic” about the EFV, which is intended to replace the Assault Amphibious Vehicle (AAV).
He said “if you look at reliability tests today, the vehicle for all intents and purposes is through the woods and into a clearing now in terms of its capacity.” He expressed frustration that, when the EFV faired poorly in the 2006 tests, the vehicles that were used “were past their service life expectancy to do reliability tests.”
Conway added that “there are a lot of folks operating on some old information vis-a-vis the EFV.”
“Once people understand that the United States Navy is not going closer than 25 miles to the shore, that they will appreciate the value of a vehicle that is really an armored personnel carrier that also planes at about 30 knots over open ocean,” the commandant said. “So we think that the program is absolutely necessary to what we do.”
Marine Col. Keith Moore, the EFV program manager, said in a Feb. 11 press release that the EFV’s arrival on the beach almost would be stealthy when compared to how the AAV operates, because of the EFV’s intended speed and smaller profile for enemy artillery.
“We’ll have a vehicle designed for the fight of the day,” Moore said, adding the EFV would give “us the flexibility to transition from high-intensity to low-intensity conflicts.”
“We’re preparing for where the next war’s going to be,” Moore said in the release, which includes pictures of EFVs in test exercises in California and Alaska. “After years of research and preparation, we’re anxious to put the prototypes through their paces.”
The EFV must succeed in the current SDD-2 effort to reach the Low Rate Initial Production phase.
Yet if the current SDD phase has problems, and the prototypes fare poorly in operational tests, “it would likely be difficult to justify a third SDD phase,” states a Congressional Research Service report by Andrew Feickert updated last December.
Feickert notes the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in a report last November called for canceling the EFV.