The Amphibious Combat Vehicle was born from one of the more significant Pentagon acquisition failures in the past decade: the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle. After spending $3 billion to develop what ultimately proved to be an unreliable vehicle, the Marine Corps threw in the towel on the EFV in January 2011 and went back to the drawing board, pressed for time to find a replacement for its 40-year-old fleet of Assault Amphibious Vehicles.
Now, three and a half years later, it’s crunch time for the program. With the Marines last year opting to forego the Marine Personnel Carrier, the service suddenly adopted an aggressive effort to quickly field the ACV Increment 1.1 to serve in the MPC’s place while it developed a hardier version of the ACV that could move from ship to shore on its own. The shift means that the Marines will have to field the ACV quickly, which means an aggressive development and procurement schedule will be necessary, even though the service hasn’t even selected a contractor to build it yet.
These days, Congress is generally leery of programs with an ambitious acquisition schedule, but lawmakers appear to be trusting the Marine Corps in this situation despite the EFV debacle, due primarily to the immediate need for the ACV. The House Armed Services Committee stated in its report after marking up this year’s authorization bill earlier this year that the panel “expects the Marine Corps to benefit from lessons learned from previous next generation assault amphibious vehicle programs that suffered from requirements creep and immature technology readiness levels that led to significant cost overruns and schedule delays.” House appropriators also said they were “supportive” of the incremental procurement effort for the ACV program.
However, the committees don’t appear to agree on what that should mean for current funding levels. House authorizers increased the ACV’s funding line from $105.7 million to $190.8 million to help accelerate the ACV Increment 1.1 program. Senate authorizers moved $67.7 million out of the program and into various other parts of the budget at the Marine Corps’ request, likely justifying it with the reality that a contract award is unlikely to happen in fiscal 2015. And House appropriators kept the funding line the same, but rescinded $78.8 million from the $123 million appropriated in last year’s spending bill, a move that allows the Marines to “immediately implement the ACV acquisition strategy once the path forward has been finalized, without unnecessarily reserving resources that could be used for higher priority items.”
Clearly, there are lots of unanswered questions for Congress ahead on how to fund the ACV program in the near term during this critical phase. However, the Marines can take solace in the fact that, almost certainly, Congress will get the program what it needs — it’s just a question of figuring out how best to do that.