By Emelie Rutherford
As the Marine Corps prepares to begin reliability tests on new Expeditionary Fighting Vehicles, the colonel in charge said he will enhance efforts to control the vehicles’ cost.
The government has received five of the seven redone prototypes General Dynamics [GD] built after earlier versions of the long-delayed amphibious vehicle missed reliability goals during a 2006 operational assessment.
Col. Keith Moore, the EFV program manager, told Defense Daily in an interview yesterday that as government officials have taken control of the new EFVs they are “starting to make the kind of progress that we expected to.”
“We’ve had no real significant surprises, either good or bad, about performance of the vehicle,” he said.
The Marine Corps has received four personnel carrier variants and one command-and-control version of the EFV, and is taking them through developmental testing. The service should take control of the seventh and final new EFV prototype in October, in an event Moore dubbed “significant.”
The long-awaited reliability-growth testing will begin on some of the EFVs in late September or early October, he said.
“That will allow us to demonstrate the initial reliability of the design,” he said. This reliability phase will amount to 500 hours of testing on each vehicle and is estimated to continue through late January of 2011. This testing constitutes the second of five so-called “knowledge points” (KPs) that are set for the once-troubled EFV program.
If the vehicle effort does not pass through the five knowledge points, officials have said, the program will be cancelled.
The EFV effort, which suffered cost and technical problems earlier this decade, was restructured and successfully emerged in 2008 from a critical design review (CDR) that determined the new vehicle design has favorable reliability estimates. As part of a second system design and development effort, formalized in a $766.8 million contract awarded in mid-2008, General Dynamics has built the seven redesigned prototypes and modified existing, faulty test vehicles.
The first knowledge point for the EFV effort was the analytically derived prediction of system reliability that was set during the December 2008 CDR.
The fifth knowledge point will lead up to the decision about whether to grant General Dynamics a contract for low-rate-initial production (LRIP) EFVs. That LRIP date has slipped and is currently set for fiscal year 2013.
The EFV program is now transitioning from more than two years of design-and-build work to testing.
“It’ll be a big transition for us,” Moore said in a phone interview from his Woodbridge, Va. office.
The “oversight community,” he said, currently is paying close attention to the EFV’s reliability-growth program.
Rumblings about the EFV’s affordability and future continue in the Pentagon and Congress. Defense Secretary Robert Gates in May called the EFV effort a prime example of a future plan that should be adjusted “as the strategic environment evolves.” The vehicle is intended to quickly carry combat-ready Marines to land from ships 25 miles off shore.
Moore said as Marine Corps officials “gain more and more confidence on knowing where we’re at technically as we get through these demonstrations …more and more of the government program office effort is going to be on ‘OK, now that we found a technical solution to providing this requirement to the Marine Corps, how can we make it as affordable as possible.”
The focus, he said, will be to “understand every element of cost that General Dynamics has in its system” and “do everything we can to work with industry to wring every bit of cost savings out of that that we possibly can.”
The program, he said, is still “very very close to the unit-cost objective” set after it was recertified in 2007 under the Nunn McCurdy process for weapon-system programs that suffer cost breaches.