By Carlo Munoz
The Marine Corps will have some version of its new Amphibious Combat Vehicle (ACV) in the field within the next four years, service Commandant Gen. James Amos told defense lawmakers yesterday.
“I want the word to get out” that the service will have a fieldable variant of the ACV by the end of his term as the Marine Corps chief, Amos said during yesterday’s House Armed Services Committee hearing on the Navy’s fiscal year 2012 budget request. Amos took the reins of the Marine Corps last October. His term is set to end in 2014.
Testifying alongside Navy Secretary Ray Mabus and Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, Amos said that the four-year goal to have some form of the ACV in the field was reasonable, compared to the initial 2024 timeline proposed by the Pentagon earlier this year.
The Marine Corps chief “wants a program of record [where] we would be bending steel and he would have a vehicle that he could drive” by the end of his term as service commandant, Mabus said shortly after the hearing. “I think we can field that, and a lot of other systems, quicker than what had been fielded,” he added, referring to the now- canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV).
“One of the biggest problems with EFV is that it started in [19] ’88,” Mabus quipped. “It is the only system that I have ever seen that we had to do a service life extension on the test vehicles.”
Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ decision to terminate the EFV earlier this year was part of a department-wide effort to draw $100 billion in departmental savings over the next five years.
The Marine Corps officially kicked off its competition to revamp its amphibious capabilities last month, rolling the ACV effort into a larger plan to modernize its existing fleet of tactical amphibious platforms, via a system of systems approach.
Navy acquisition officials issued three separate requests for information (RFI) for modernization work on the Marine Corps’ Amphibious Assault Vehicle, follow-on acquisition of the Marine Personnel Carrier and development work on the ACV, according to service documents posted on the FedBizOpps.gov web site Feb. 22.
During its presentation of the service’s FY ’12 budget plan, Navy and Pentagon acquisition officials stated publicly that the soonest an ACV would be ready was 2024. Senior Marine Corps leaders, incuding Amos, have vehemently pushed back against the idea that it could take 14 years to field a new amphibious vehicle.
In response, Amos and others in the service initially advocated putting the ACV effort on a similiar acquistion track as the Mine Resistant Ambush Vehicle, which would get the new platform into the field within a matter of months, rather than years.
However, the four-year goal set forth by the commadant yesterday represented a comproise between the MRAP option and the 2024 fielding date, while still reflecting the “sense of urgency” coming from the Pentagon and Navy leadership to get a new amphibious vehicle to the Marine Corps, Amos told lawmakers.
Earlier this month, the service commandant even admitted that the ACV “will not be as fast as the MRAP” in terms of deliveries, but still indicated that getting the vehicle to the field remained one of his top priorities.
“We are pushing real hard. I am not going to admire this program,” he said during a Feb. 18 Defense Writers Group breakfast.