The Marine Corps should have its requirements documents for the Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) Increment 1 complete within about six months and award a production contract in fiscal year 2017, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration told a Senate subcommittee Wednesday.
Lt. Gen. Kenneth Glueck told the Senate Armed Services seapower subcommittee that the requirements would be largely based off those from the canceled Marine Personnel Carrier program and that the four vehicles the Marines tested at the Nevada Automotive Test Center last would likely compete for the contract.
“If we can stay on track with the current process, we should have an [initial operational capability] by about 2020,” he said. To keep the program moving forward quickly, the contractors will make only minor changes to their prototypes to keep research and development costs minimal. In terms of technical specifications, the winning bid for Increment 1 will likely be “essentially probably 90 percent of the vehicle we’ve already seen today.”
Glueck said that, in parallel to this acquisition effort, the Marine Corps would also do survivability upgrades to 392 of the service’s 1,062 legacy Assault Amphibious Vehicles, as well as begin research and development for high water speed technologies and research and development for a new connector that would bring the ACV from an amphibious ship to about five miles offshore.
The general noted that the current connectors, Landing Craft Air Cushions (LCACs) and Landing Craft Utilities (LCUs) are being upgraded and replaced, but he said the Marine Corps wanted something more advanced to link with the ACV.
“We’re looking for something more along the lines of the Joint High Speed Vessel, for example, or another connector similar to that that’s going to be able to give us probably 25 to 35 knots,” he said.
After the hearing, Glueck told reporters that even though the Marines originally wanted a high-speed ACV that could self-deploy from the well deck of an amphib, operational requirements may have required the connector even with the more expensive high-speed ACV.
“What we’ve found as we’ve done the development is the sea base may have to be pushed farther out–way beyond, maybe even beyond 25 miles, maybe based on the threat and the situation it could be 50 or 75 miles,” he said. “And that’s where that connector is going to become all-important. Even if you had a self-deployer, you’re still going to have to use a connector to get that vehicle even closer to the shore so you could make use of the speed that it had.”
Glueck said the Marine Corps’ testing with the former MPC competitors did not include any open sea testing, so it is unclear right now how any of them would fare in the surf zone and in various sea states. He said, though, that the requirements will ask for ACV Increment 1 to handle sea state 3 and be a robust swimmer that can get from about five miles offshore to the beach in less than an hour.
Compared to MPC, “we’re going to look at putting a little bit more of a robust [swimming] requirement in there, but still something that’s achievable,” he said.
Other changes from the MPC program include additional seating for Marines.
“We don’t have to do any real R&D efforts on most of these vehicles,” Glueck said of the MPC competitors. “Some of it’s going to be, let’s just say for example, the initial requirement for MPC was for nine seats. We’d like to have maybe a few more seats in there–when you look at the inside of the vehicle, depending on which manufacturer, there is room to go ahead and expand a few more seats in there, so those are some of the things that we’ll look at–low-cost, low-impact changes that we can make without delaying the ability to be able to field that vehicle.”
Overall, he said, “I think all four of them could reasonably meet these” requirements his office had drafted so far.
The Marines would have money in FY ’17 for a production contract and hope to be ready to make a decision by then, to allow for IOC in FY ’20 and a full fleet of Increment 1 ACVs and upgraded AAVs by FY ’22.
During the same hearing, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. John Paxton told senators that another major acquisition program, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, was potentially at risk of having to push back its IOC.
Paxton said the aircraft themselves are delivering on schedule but “the software is tentatively behind schedule. The IOC is forecasted for July of ’15, but we have every expectation that that could be delayed by several months. It will continue to be conditions-based–we won’t declare IOC until we work through the issues with the systems provider.”
Later in the hearing, he clarified that no formal delays have taken place. He is just planning for the worst-case scenario out of caution.
“July ’15 is the planned IOC date,” Paxton said. “We had indications that that would be hard to meet. We have been assured by Lockheed Martin that they would take this onboard and are tackling it hard. I was trying to reiterate what Gen. Glueck said to Sen. [John] McCain (R-Ariz.), that this is still going to be conditions-based, that we do want to fly it and maintain it and make sure it’s operationally ready before we declare IOC or [full operational capability], that we are going to work with the contractors collectively to make sure that the performance requirements and thresholds are actually met before we do any declaration.”