The Marine Corps is about a month away from choosing two of five companies to proceed with the next phase of its Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) program.
A downselect from the current five-competitor field to just two that will move onto engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) will happen before the end of the year, most likely in November, Assistant Commandant of the Marine Gen. John Paxton said Wednesday at a breakfast meeting hosted by the Navy League outside Washington, D.C.
The program to replace the aging Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAV) has been long delayed while the Marine Corps ironed out what it required in a ship-to-shore armored troop carrier. Since the service decided on a phased approach beginning with a non-developmental ACV 1.1, budget cuts have delayed progress and could still, Paxton said.
“I’m not sure how that is going to be adjusted because of either the inputs coming from the vendors or what may be in play because of the NDAA [FY ’16 Defense Authorization Bill], too,” Paxton said. “We have every expectation we’re going to do it this quarter.”
Manny Pacheco, a spokesman for the Marine Corps land systems program office, assured the audience that this time, a decision to enter EMD would be made.
“We’re on track … for mid-November,” Pacheco said. Plans are to convene a defense acquisition board sometime in mid-November, which should result in a downselect decision. The service will buy 16 ACVs from each of the companies chosen for EMD.
A single company will go on to produce about 200 ACV 1.1 vehicles beginning in 2018. The Marine Corps wants to buy about 204 ACV 1.1 vehicles at a unit cost of up to $7.5 million. Plans are to equip six battalions by 2023 with ACVs while modernizing 392 existing AAVs with survivability and communications upgrades. SAIC [SAI] is on contract for the upgrade work.
Two weeks before the meeting, the Marine Corps got to view four of the five ACV competitors in the same place. Offerings from Lockheed Martin [LMT], BAE Systems, General Dynamics [GD] and SAIC literally faced off at the center of the main exhibit hall at the Modern Day Marine tech expo held at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., in late September.
Advanced Defense Vehicle Systems, or AVDS, did not exhibit at the expo. Though a longshot contender, ADVS has enlisted Textron [TXT] and IR Technologies to act as subcontractors and boost its industry credibility.
Paxton visited the Quantico expo and toured each of the vehicles, three of which he already has seen put through offroad trials at the Nevada Automotive Test Center. Seeing such technologically sophisticated vehicles in a non-developmental program was heartening, he said.
“To see the commitment from industry partners to look at the requirements, to do novel engineering solutions, to work on command and control, to look at cube-and-square for cargo, to look at interoperability between a crew chief and a vehicle driver and the things they have done on all these vehicles is really pretty impressive,” he said. “It makes you feel good about the state of technology and the state of intellect in the United States and in the cooperation between industry and all the military.”