The Marine Corps Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) and Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) have both emerged from protests relatively unscathed, though the Humvee replacement will enter service about a year late because of “cascading effects,” Navy and Marine officials told lawmakers April 13.
“Our ground vehicle modernization strategy is to sequentially modernize priority capabilities, reduce equipment inventory requirements wherever possible and judiciously sustain remaining equipment,” Lt. Gen. Robert Walsh, deputy commandant of the Marine Corps and chief of Combat Development Command said during a hearing of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on seapower.
“The Amphibious Combat Vehicle enables us to do so and is the Marine Corps highest ground combat modernization program and consists of two increments.”
The vehicles competing for ACV 1.1 originally were considered for the now-defunct Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC) program, which sought non-developmental troop carriers provided ground mobility with a limited swim capability. The ACV 1.1 personnel vehicles will ride to shore from assault ships aboard connectors like landing craft air cushions.
ACV 1.2 will introduce command-and-control, recovery and other variants to the ACV fleet but will not differ significantly from the 1.1 increment in swim capability.
Meanwhile, 392 legacy AAVs will undergo capability and service-life extension upgrades that will keep them in service as the Marine Corps’ primary ship-to-shore combat vehicle for the foreseeable future.
ACV 2.0 will reintroduce the ability to self-deploy from ships and travel to shore under fire at a high water speed. The Marine Corps decided on this multi-pronged approach to replacing its amphibious vehicles after a dogged pursuit of a tracked vehicle that could move at high speed through the water became prohibitively expensive. Deferring some capabilities and tempering its desire to meet all requirements at once allowed the service to spread out acquisition and save money, said Walsh and Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Expeditionary Programs and Logistics Management Thomas Dee.
“We were on a path to an amphibious combat vehicle with some question as to what the priority capabilities were,” Dee said. “We took a pause for that and with that pause we were able to reprioritize, emphasize the capabilities that we most required: the ability to operate ashore once we got ashore.”
Instead of launching a new development project, the Marine Corps put out a call for mature vehicle designs that could meet its ashore mobility needs and had some degree of amphibious capability. Seven vendors initially were considered before five officially participated in the ACV 1.1 program.
The Marine Corps last year selected Science Applications International Corp. [SAIC] and BAE Systems to produce 17 prototypes apiece for the engineering and manufacturing development (EMD) phase of the program. A decision on which vehicle will enter low-rate production should be made in 2018.
“The idea behind that was the competition will cause price to come down, which it has significantly below our previous service cost position,” Dee said. “We have got a very abbreviated EMD… which will lead to developmental testing as well as the beginning of some operational tactics development.”
General Dynamics [GD] launched a protest in November that was dismissed in February by the Government Accountability Office, halting preparations for EMD production for those three months.
Everything is on track,” he added. “We are at cost or below cost. We are a little behind in schedule because of the protest…but it is a fairly minimal delay that we are experiencing with this. Both of the contractors leaned forward during the delay to avoid losing much time.”
Another advantage is that while the program’s development schedule was delayed about three months, its funding is still phased in the correct year for both EMD and procurement, Dee said.
Second on the Marine Corps’ modernization priority list is replacement of a portion of its Humvee fleet with the JLTV. The Marine Corps plans to buy 5,500 JLTVs before it fields ACV 1.1, Walsh said.
The program was tenaciously protested by losing bidder Lockheed Martin [LMT], which first took its case to the Government Accountability Office and then to the Court of Federal Claims. Winner Oshkosh [OSK] was prevented from building trucks only for the 90-day GAO protest period, but that delay threw off scheduled testing and other necessary work required for the low-rate initial production phase of the program, Dee said.
“We don’t account for a potential protest in our schedules, generally,” Dee said. “We try to establish our selection criteria so that it is very clear to the vendors so that we are at minimal risk of protest. But that doesn’t stop the protests from happening.”
Dee said the Defense Department receives about 2,000 protests a year out of tens of thousands of awarded contracts.
“That 90-day delay cascaded into a further delay in testing because of test range availability and schedules,” Dee said. “So a 90-day delay grew into about a six- or eight-month delay because of the difficulty rescheduling the test phase that we were going to do.”
That testing must be done before a decision can be made on whether and when to begin full-rate production, he said. That puts funding out of phase for the production phase. In the end, initial operational capability for JLTV was pushed back about a year, Dee said.
“Not all of that is related directly to the protest itself, but the cascading effect of the protest and then some decisions we made internally to be able to better address any potential changes that come out of testing prior to FRP (full rate production), to be sure we give the first battalion equipped the most capable, ready vehicle.”