By Emelie Rutherford
The Marine Corps’s Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) is slated to pass critical testing this week, just as the service proceeds with plans to terminate the long-delayed vehicle effort.
Meanwhile, senior House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Republicans demanded yesterday that Defense Secretary Robert Gates not issue a stop-work order on the General Dynamics [GD] program until their committee has examined his proposal to cancel it.
Marine Corps spokesman Emanuel Pacheco said yesterday that four new EFV prototypes already have exceeded more than the desired 500 hours of reliability-growth testing, and are surpassing a minimum requirement for mean time between operational mission failure (MTBOMF).
The reliability-growth examination of the EFV prototypes, which are do-overs of the amphibious tanks that fared poorly in past testing, started last October and was intended to help the service determine whether to proceed with the costly development effort. However, Gates called last month for canceling the program. The service, thus, intends to use the EFV test results to inform efforts to develop a replacement New Amphibious Vehicle (NAV).
The Marine Corps had a goal for the four EFV prototypes–one command-and-control and three personnel variants–to have a minimum average MTBOMF of 16.4 hours. Now, those numbers, at this late-stage of testing, are “probably in the low-to-mid 20s,” Pacheco told Defense Daily.
“We’re comfortable knowing we’re where we need to be,” he said. “We were hoping to be 16 to 22 hours…And we won’t know for certain until we get the validated data, which will probably be about the middle of February, but we suspect we’re in the low-to-mid 20s.”
Pacheco, who works in the EFV program office, said while Marine Corps officials have MTBOMF figures now in the 20s, traditionally such preliminary numbers tend to be off by roughly 10 percent in either direction. That’s because the raw data from the testing has to be reviewed by a scoring conference of Marine Corps colonels, who will determine if some results were inadvertently swayed by factors such as a test range being shut down for part of a day, he said.
The MTBOMF figure is determined by taking the number of hours a vehicle runs and dividing it by the amount of mission failures.
The four EFV prototypes were slated to undergo 500 hours of reliability-growth testing at the Amphibious Vehicle Test Branch at Camp Pendleton, Calif.
The vehicles had already exceeded 500 hours mid-day yesterday, Pacheco said. The testing continued, he said, because two of them were still in the midst of completing testing missions. Pacheco said the testing will wrap up this week and the EFVs will likely hit up to 540 hours of testing.
The prototypes have undergone water, land, firepower, and communications testing during multi-hour missions that range from a simulated trip from ship to shore to entering a range and shooting at targets for hours, he said.
The EFV effort, which suffered cost overruns and technical problems earlier this decade, was restructured and successfully emerged in 2008 from a critical design review that determined the new vehicle design had favorable reliability estimates. As part of a second system design and development effort, formalized in a $766.8 million contract awarded in 2008, General Dynamics built the seven redesigned prototypes and modified existing, faulty test vehicles.
Of the three new EFV prototypes that did not undergo reliability-growth testing, two personnel variants have been undergoing automotive testing on their engines and transmissions at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The seventh new EFV, a command-and-control version, has been conducting communications testing at Camp Pendleton.
The Marine Corps in the coming weeks is expected to issue three requests for information (RFIs) to industry, seeking input on developing the NAV, upgrading the Amphibious Assault Vehicles the EFVs were intended to replace, and buying Marine Personnel Carriers.
Lt. Gen. George Flynn, deputy commandant for combat development and integration, told reporters last month that the EFV reliability-growth-testing data will be used to inform the new NAV effort.
“Our intent is to continue to learn from those prototypes,” Pacheco said yesterday.
“Obviously the requirement to have a self-deploying amphibious capability has been validated at every turn in the road,” the Marine Corps spokesman added. “So even the proposed cancellation of this program, the next step is going to be to find something to be able to do this. So our intent and the program’s intent–and I think it was the leadership’s desire as well–to learn as much as we can from what we’ve done so far, and to hopefully at some point in time be able to incorporate that into whatever the future may hold.”
Also yesterday, HASC Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) and committee Republicans Reps. Roscoe Bartlett (Md.), Mac Thornberry (Texas), Todd Akin (Mo.), Randy Forbes (Va.), Joe Wilson (S.C.) Michael Turner (Ohio), and Rob Wittman (Va.) sent Gates a letter demanding he not issue a stop-work order on the EFV program to General Dynamics before the lawmakers examine his proposals to end the EFV and other weapon-system efforts.
Flynn told reporters last month a stop-work order was in the works at the Pentagon.
“If true, this action would cease the program before the House Armed Services Committee and other congressional defense committees have had the opportunity to review the analysis and other documentation that led to the recommendation to terminate the EFV and whether it is in fact an ‘efficiency,’ and/or is in the best interest of our national security,” the HASC lawmakers wrote to Gates.