By Emelie Rutherford
A Marine Corps board is expected to sign off this month on a new plan for the future Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC), a medium-weight armored vehicle program recently delayed by two years because of fiscal constraints.
Service officials decided in April to halt plans to allow the MPC to enter into the technology demonstration stage and then issue a request for proposals for it–actions expected this past spring–because of a lack of funding. A new plan shifting the schedule to right by two years is being staffed to the Marine Corps Requirements Oversight Council (MROC), said Kevin McConnell at Marine Corps Combat Development Command.
“I assume that that [plan] is going to be concurred with by the MROC members because it’s been widely briefed,” said McConnell, deputy director of the fires and maneuver integration division.
The decision to delay MPC “was purely about the budget,” and the program “is actually a very high priority,” McConnell said.
“We really do need it, we just can’t afford it, at least not in the near term,” he said.
“We needed money in FY [fiscal year] ’09, and MPC became the source of that funding,” he added, noting some monies previously eyed for MPC instead will be spent on adding armor to Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement vehicles (MTVRs).
The MPC funding was reduced in FY ’09 and in the Marine Corps’ submission for the Program Objective Memorandum ’10 (POM ’10), the longterm budget for FY ’10 through FY ’15. The service’s POM ’10 submission is complete and working its way to the Office of the Secretary of Defense this month.
The MPC is intended to complement two other future Marine Corps vehicles–the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) and the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV).
“The way we looked at it is if we move the program we could better synchronize it with fielding EFVs, so we get that complementary capability,” McConnell said. “While I think the requirement for MPC is pretty clear and we can use it today, we also have a lot of vehicles right now, and we can afford to accept a little bit of risk. So rather than kind of pushing back on it and then losing money anyway, we just kind of right-sized and have taken a much more conservative approach to the program.”
Bringing the MPC to the MROC lays out the new schedule for the program–with a revised estimate for initial operational capability in 2017, instead of 2014–and also secures the program, McConnell said.
“It formalizes the need for the requirement,” he said. “The commandant [of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway] and the Marine Corps leadership have expressed verbally that there is a definite need for the requirement…In sending this back to the MROC, I’ve captured those words so that within the Marine Corps–and particularly [for] the defense industry that’s most interested in what we’re doing–that we say, ‘Yes, we have an absolute requirement for MPC, and we are committed to it. But we’re committed at a much slower pace than we were.'”
The MROC will likely sign off this month on a decision titled, “Marine Personnel Carrier Way Ahead,” he predicted.
The service council early this year approved a recommended definition of the MPC–as a medium-class, wheeled and armored personnel carrier–that grew out of an analysis of alternatives (AOA) last year.
While the MPC program is being delayed from an acquisition perspective, McConnell said “on the requirements side, we have a lot of work to do.”
“For example, we’re going to update our analysis of alternatives, probably in FY ’09,” he said, “We’ll be able to take into account more knowledge about vehicles, any more emerging threats. We’ll use that to just update the analysis, so it’s current and it’ll adequately support the program when it does get going.”
He said he believes the vehicle the Marine Corps wants for the MPC has already been built by industry.
“We weren’t concerned about stretching technology or that kind of stuff,” he said. “We knew that many vendors out there have vehicles that are so close to meeting our requirements that there was no real worry about risk in the program.”
However, he acknowledged there would be a “challenge…to integrate some of the systems that don’t come with the vehicle.”
Some service and industry officials had talked of the MPC becoming a joint program with the Army, and McConnell said that idea is likely still alive.
“One of the things that delaying the program by two years is going to do, it’s going to allow the industry to mature a little bit,” he said. “It’s also going to allow the Army to mature their requirements a little bit for what they might decide to do with their Stryker vehicle. And all of those things kind of point to maybe an increased opportunity for a joint program.”
Before the MPC emerges, McConnell said the Marine Corps has vehicles including Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs), MTVRs, and new Humvees that “are meeting our mobility requirements where we’re working right now.”