The Marine Corps has completed additional cost studies on its Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) program and slightly raised its cost estimate to about $5 million per vehicle.
Lt. Gen. Kenneth Glueck, deputy commandant for combat development and integration, said Thursday at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington that the four contractors under consideration estimated a cost a bit lower than $5 million, but when the Marine Corps factors in other programmatic costs–particularly extra vehicles needed for testing and spares–he expects the program to come to $5 million or $6 million per operational vehicle.
In April, Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James Amos told Defense Daily that some of the four contractors under consideration–the four who participated in the Marine Personnel Carrier competition before the program was canceled–had open production lines for foreign militaries, and he thought he could buy the vehicles for $3 million to $4.5 million per vehicle (Defense Daily, March 26) He said he wanted to buy 200 or 300 vehicles as is, and then let Marines in the field decide what additional features they’d want to see in the next increment.
Glueck echoed that, saying ACV 1.1 would be essentially an off-the-shelf vehicle–the Marine Corps may ask for a slightly longer vehicle to accommodate more passenger seats, officials have said–and ACV 1.2 could grow somewhat more expensive if additional capabilities are added.
“When you go to the 1.2, you want to add additional capabilities like command and control, maybe a logistics variant, maybe a command and control variant, then the price of those might go up,” Glueck said. “But basically you’re going to be dealing with the same frame, the same drive systems, it’s just going to be adding some additional capability.”
The ACVs would travel at about 8 knots through the water, about the same speed as the Amphibious Assault vehicles they are meant to replace. The Marine Corps originally wanted a high water speed vehicle but will instead load the slower ACVs onto a high-speed connector to bring them from ship to shore.
Glueck said the Marines are looking at concepts of operation for the ACV that incorporate not only the Landing Craft Air Cushion (LCAC) and its follow-on Ship-to-Shore Connector (SSC) but also the “future of connectors,” whatever that may be.
“What we’ve seen right now is that there is a swim capability that the [ACV] has, and we’re going to do some testing over the next two years here when we do the competition to be able to see exactly what the true swim qualities of the vehicles are” to determine whether the connectors would need to bring ACVs all the way to the shore, or whether they could drop the ACVs off a mile offshore, for example.
Glueck said that the four contractors believe their vehicles can handle up to sea state 3, which includes very choppy water conditions, but the Marine Corps will need to confirm that in testing before deciding how to proceed with connectors for ACV.
Whatever the Marines do with the connector, the ACV plus its high-speed connector will still likely be cheaper than a high-speed ACV option, and it will certainly be more operationally effective. Glueck explained that the high-speed option, which would have cost $12 million to $14 million a vehicle, would have to stay under a certain weight to be able to plane across the water.
“You’ve got a certain amount of propulsion, which is a very large engine that’s in there, which takes up size, vehicle space inside,” he said. “But it also limits the amount of weight the vehicle can be. And when you start looking at force protection for our forces, for example, weight means something. To have armor protection for the forces against IEDs and other types of weapons out there, you need to have weight to give you that armor protection.”
Overall, he said, achieving the lower weight meant taking seats out and taking weight out of the vehicle armor and suspension.
“What you ended up with was a vehicle that, yeah, it can get up on a plane, yeah it maybe can do 23 to 25 knots, but once it gets ashore it’s not optimized for 90 percent of the mission the Marines need it for.”