By Emelie Rutherford
While it remains to be seen how the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) fares in a major Pentagon review, the Marine Corps is making progress developing reconfigured prototypes of the next-generation amphibious tank.
Col. Keith Moore, the EFV program manager, told Defense Daily in a September interview he is “in the same boat” with other people waiting to see if the General Dynamics [GD] program survives the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).
In the meantime, he said several significant events are occurring this fall with the long-delayed effort to build a tracked amphibious vehicle to carry Marines inland from ships more than 20 miles offshore.
The EFV program, which suffered significant cost and technical problems earlier this decade, was restructured and successfully emerged late last year from a Critical Design Review that determined the new vehicle design has favorable reliability estimates. As part of a second System Design and Development effort, formalized in a $766.8 million contract awarded in mid-2008, General Dynamics is building redesigned prototypes and modifying existing, faulty test vehicles.
Moore said the hulls for four of the seven new prototypes have begun the assembly process, and last week a fifth hull was poised to begin assembly. The functional integration is beginning on the vehicles, with the initial installment of software developed by the Air Force expected, as of last week, to be installed on the first prototype starting this week.
Moore said he was “pretty excited and anxious to see how” the General Dynamics-built vehicles fare with the new ground-up software developed at Hill AFB, Utah. All the core software driving the initial test vehicles was developed by General Dynamics.
Moore estimated subsequent software will be installed in that first new prototype in November, after which the vehicle can be driven around. He said by the end of the year a “significant amount of function integration” should be done on the first few EFVs.
The first of the new prototypes is expected to be sent from a manufacturing center in Ohio to the Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton in California in late January or early February for testing including high-water-speed maneuvering in the ocean. General Dynamics is projected to turn the first vehicle over to the government in late April or early May, he said.
When “the government takes over the tests, we’ll start to work through some of the performance verification in the summer (of 2010), so that’s when we’ll really get a feel for those areas that we knew that the previous vehicle’s performance had been kind of marginal,” Moore said. “(We’ll get) an opportunity to see how much better than the threshold requirement we are…and we’ll start to get a little bit better feel too for the overall system reliability.”
A dedicated reliability demonstration with three or four of the new EFV prototypes is pegged for the fall of 2010, he said.
“I think many of the folks that have sort of been on the fence and sort of skeptical of us over the last couple years, I think they’ll start to see that real data and real demonstrations of hardware and we’ll hopefully win over a lot of our critics or skeptics,” he said.
Four of the 10 existing, flawed EFV prototypes are being reworked as well. Moore said he expected to start installing the modifications on the first vehicle in mid-October. The older EFV prototypes have been used for varied testing and training purposes, and one of them will be on display at the Modern Day Marine expo.
The service also is developing an EFV armor appliqu�, which is intended to address congressional concerns about the vehicle’s level of protection from underbelly explosions. The Marine Corps approved the requirement for the add-on armor in May, two years after lawmakers called for the EFV to have a V-shaped hull like mine-resistant trucks do.
“We’re continue to move on that” appliqu� armor kit, Moore said. “Over the next year we will build a couple of subscale mockups of the hull floor, put some appliqu� on those so that at the smaller subscale level we can make sure that we’ve optimized the design as much as we can…After we get through that, we’ll build a full-scale hull with an appliqu� kit on it and do additional live-fire tests on that.”
The first full-sized appliqu� test article is expected in the second quarter of fiscal year 2011, he said.
The Marine Corps plans to outfit EFVs that are fielded with the detachable armor packages.
Moore and other EFV officials continue to tout analyses that found the armor appliqu� is the best solution. Lawmakers including House Armed Services Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor (D-Miss.), meanwhile, said they continue to have concerns about the armor plans for the vehicle.
“A lot of our job is still trying to communicate to the Congress and even to others within (the Office of the Secretary of Defense) OSD and the Department of the Navy all of really the hard engineering analysis that shows why the appliqu� approach is really the best for this type of vehicle,” Moore said. “Any sort of a tracked armored vehicle, this is probably the better way to go.”
“We intend through all the live-fire events that we’re going to be doing to have some hard data to back up the analysis that shows even with a flat bottom, with other things that we can do, all of the other ways in which we’ve tried to build survivability into the vehicle for embarked infantry…we can substantially mitigate the risk of death and serious injury given a nominal (improvised-explosive device) IED threat simply by the way in which we’ve arranged components inside the vehicle,” he added.
He said he hopes to “increase the level of confidence among the Congress that while the vehicle’s not got a V-hull, a V-hull doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense for this vehicle if the overall level of protection that we’re giving to embarked Marines is equal to or better than many of other vehicles that are out there.”
The House-passed defense appropriations bill calls for cutting the Marine Corps’s $294.5 million funding proposal for the EFV by $50 million, while the version of the bill before the Senate, as of last week, fully funds the request.
A $50 million reduction would delay the current EFV schedule by approximately two to three months, Moore said.
“Our story with the Congress has been that we have a lot to show for all the hard work that’s been put in,” he said. “We’ve recovered from many of the previous technical and programmatic criticisms of the EFV and we really need the funding so that we can prove all that. Now’s not the time to induce a delay for delay’s sake.”
The vehicle program is slated to reach a Milestone C decision, which would allow it to enter into low-rate-initial production, in 2011.
Moore said he is “very confident that the vehicle is going to demonstrate that it’s on an appropriate reliability-growth path” and “for other areas where performance was maybe marginal…our performance is going to exceed threshold requirements across the board.”
Amid all the focus on past EFV testing shortcomings, Moore said he is looking forward to the “next six or seven months as we’re able to start pushing vehicles out there and people to actually to see the fruits of all (our) labor” over the past two and half years.
To EFV supporters’ chagrin, Defense Secretary Robert Gates questioned during an April 17 Naval War College speech if the United States will again launch major amphibious actions requiring such a forcible-entry vehicle as the EFV.