NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – One of the two vehicles that will become the U.S. Marine Corps’ new Amphibious Combat Vehicle exercised its sea legs last month with the Italian military, giving the U.S. sea services a free-of-charge preview of its combat capabilities.
Italian marines in March took an Iveco-built Super AV – the vehicle on which BAE Systems‘ ACV 1.1 is based – to sea aboard their amphibious ships and performed from-shore and ship-to-shore maneuvers. The vehicle the Italians demoed was – with some minor configuration changes – an exact production copy of the ACV 1.1 that the Marine Corps is currently testing, Jim Miller, BAE’s director of business development, told Defense Daily in a March 4 interview.
“Last week they went out with the … Italian navy with the Super AV on one of their amphibious ships,” he said at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference in National Harbor, Md. “They did sea launch and recovery in the Mediterranean … The rehearsal day was a bad day. We had sea-state 3. It was a little bit choppy but the Italians launched anyway – launched and recovered in sea-state 3.”
Sea-state 3 is considered lightly choppy with waves up to 4 feet. The following day the vehicles launched again in sea-state 2 for the formal demonstrations along with legacy assault amphibious vehicles, Miller said.
BAE and Iveco developed the production representative Super AV on their own dimes to potentially fill a need for amphibious capability in both the Italian army and navy, Miller said. That the U.S. Marine Corps got a sneak peek at the vehicle’s capabilities was a bonus, though the service did not officially observe the Italian exercises.
“It’s great risk reduction and allows us to focus the rest of our program here as we go forward, by demonstrating a successful sea launch and recovery both at sea-state 2 and at sea-state 3 is pretty important,” he said. “It was a pretty successful week last week for the Italians and Iveco and for us, demonstrating that vehicle can do what we’ve been talking about in the big blue sea of the Mediterranean.
“In sea-state 3, it got a little too rough, so they launched and went to the beach,” Miller joked.
BAE so far has delivered six of its ACVs to the Marine Corps, which has ordered 16 vehicles each from it and competitor Sciences Applied International Corp. [SAIC]. The remaining 10 vehicles are in some stage of assembly at BAE’s York, Pa., manufacturing facility.
The Marine Corps has begun initial testing at sites across the country of the two competitors’ vehicles in preparation for an eventual downselect to a single vendor. Each company is under a $120 million contract to build respective fleets of engineering and manufacturing development ACVs.
SAIC pitched a vehicle based on teammate Singapore Technologies Kinetics Terrex 2, which is in service with the Singaporean marines.