By Geoff Fein
The drop in attacks on Marines in Iraq has in part led the service to re-examine the number of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles it will buy as the Corps moves toward a mix of larger trucks and smaller uparmored Humvees, the Commandant of the Marine Corps said.
The proposal by the Marine Corps to cut back on its MRAP vehicle purchases will potentially save the government $1.7 billion, Marine Corps Gen. James Conway told reporters Wednesday during a Pentagon briefing.
The Marine Corps is looking to end its MRAP buy at 2,300, Conway said.
“That’s all we contracted for through this month. There is another purchase order that is going to be submitted in December and another in March,” he noted.
After next spring, Conway doesn’t see any further MRAP orders being placed by the Marine Corps.
“Our numbers are not all delivered. We contracted for 2,300, and we’ll end hopefully at that number if our recommendation is [accepted],” he added. “We hope then that the Army can get their vehicles faster.”
The Joint Requirement Oversight Council will take the Marine Corps’ recommendation and make a determination on the number of MRAPs the service plans to buy, Conway said.
He believes the Marine Corps’ recommendation will be favorably received because there are other requirements out there for those vehicles.
In September 2006, commanders in theater wanted to replace every uparmored Humvee the Marine Corps had in Iraq with an MRAP, because of the success the V-shaped hull vehicles were having with surviving under body explosions, Conway said.
“What’s happened since September 2006…its been amazing on most accounts…we have not lost nearly the numbers of vehicles we were experiencing because attacks have gone down dramatically,” he said.
Additionally, some commanders in the field have said the larger MRAPs don’t provide the flexibility that the smaller, lighter weight vehicles do and that the larger vehicles have problems operating in off-road conditions.”What we found, [commanders] are mixing their convoys and patrols with some MRAPs, but also with some 7-ton vehicles and some uparmored Humvees,” Conway said. “That mix has also driven down our requirement.”
Of the three MRAP variants, the smaller Category I MRAPs, “are going to serve a long term value to us even in an expeditionary environment because we have, for decades…at least 20 years, labored with what should be our engineer combat vehicles. We really haven’t had one. The dump truck is probably the closest thing that we have had that served that purpose,” Conway said.
“Now we’ve got one that’s 360 [degree] protected. It can [race] into a fight and protect those young men and women, deliver them to whatever the obstacle is and in some cases even breech it,” he said. “We are going to have to develop that vehicle to its fullest I think as an engineer and EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) combat vehicle.”
The Marine Corps was concerned about the impact to industry from its decision, however Conway said the service checked to make sure they were not being unfair to industry and leaving companies with excess steel, tires and transmissions. “So we are comfortable that our timing [was] pretty good,” Conway said.
Had the Marine Corps received the go-ahead to move troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, that re-deployment would have also impacted MRAP buys, Conway noted.
“If there was a chance we’d go to Afghanistan in significant numbers, our MRAP requirements would have been reduced. Because if you look at the terrain where MRAPs would have been involved, there is much less of it in Afghanistan than there is in Iraq,” Conway said. “So if we were to go there, [we] would have taken several hundred vehicles, not a few thousand, with us simply because of that geographic situation.”
On a recent trip to see troops in Iraq, Conway had the opportunity to visit with HMM-263, the MV-22 Osprey squadron stationed at Al Asad Air Base.
Conway told reporters the deployment is going well. “A lot of things [are] still to be determined. We’ll know more at the end of their seven month deployment,” he said. “Their maintenance rates are about where we want them to be. The mission profile is precisely that of the aircraft they are replacing.”
The Osprey is replacing the CH-46 and the CH-53D helicopters in theater, Conway added. “They are doing everything those airplanes do except doing it three times faster.”