By Emelie Rutherford
The Pentagon wants to invest some of the money it hopes to save by canceling the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) in vehicles including the Humvee and Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC), according to aides briefed yesterday.
Five days after Defense Secretary Robert Gates proposed $178 billion in Pentagon budget cuts over the next five years, military service undersecretaries briefed yesterday a group of partially skeptical congressional aides on the details of those reductions.
Gates wants to cancel the Marine Corps’ long-delayed EFV, a track-amphibious vehicle being developed by General Dynamics [GD] that he said has cost $3 billion to develop and would cost another $12 billion to build.
Before hearing from Navy Under Secretary Bob Work yesterday, lawmakers did not know where the money saved by canceling the EFV would go.
“According to Work, the Marines kept it all,” an aide said after the Capitol Hill meeting with Pentagon officials.
If Gates succeeds in overcoming congressional opposition to his plan to kill the EFV, the Marine Corps would have $2.588 billion over the next five years that it could redirect to other programs. Additional monies previously pegged for the EFV also would be saved in later years.
Some of those funds would be spent on developing a new amphibious vehicle program that the Marine Corps is just now planning, called the New Amphibious Vehicle (NAV), and to upgrade the Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAV), the aging water-going tank the EFV was intended to replace.
Also, the existing vehicle efforts the EFV monies would bolster, aides learned yesterday, include the recapitalization of the Marine Corps’ existing Humvees, which would receive $200 million over five years.
Another $400 million in EFV monies would be shifted to the MPC, a developmental effort to build personnel carriers that has been delayed in recent years because of the lack of funding.
Also, of the $2.588 billion not spent on the EFV over the next five years, $488 million would go to Marine Corps general procurement needs, to make up for equipment shortages resulting from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, aides said.
The new NAV effort would receive $500 million in redirected EFV monies over five years, and another $1 billion would be spent on AAV upgrades, Work reportedly said during yesterday’s closed briefing on Capitol Hill.
It remains to be seen if Congress will approve the Pentagon’s plan to cut the EFV.
Lawmakers who have pledged support for the EFV include House Armed Services Committee (HASC) Chairman Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.), Seapower and Expeditionary Forces subcommittee Chairman Todd Akin (R-Mo.), and member Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.).
McKeon said last week that HASC members “remain committed to the Marine Corps as an expeditionary fighting force ‘in ready’, which includes the capability to conduct amphibious landings,” adding that that “mission could be jeopardized by the cancellation of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, a capability re-validated by the (defense) secretary just last year.”
Ohio lawmakers Sen. Sherrod Brown (D) and Reps. Marcy Kaptur (D) Jim Jordan (R) also asked President Barack Obama in a Jan. 6 letter to prevent the cancellation of the EFV before current testing of redesigned prototypes is complete. The reliability-growth testing started last October and is slated to run through the end of the month.
Other EFV supporters in the Senate include Senate Armed Services Committee member Jim Webb (D-Va.), who last year called on Gates to at least allow EFV prototypes to complete the testing.
General Dynamics is making a push for the Marine Corps to keep developing the EFV, but to purchase 200 instead of 573 vehicles. Reducing the buy to 200 vehicles would save $4.6 billion from the current estimated cost for the EFV program, while still outfitting two Marine Expeditionary Brigades, the company said.
The EFV effort, which suffered a significant cost breach 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 mid-2008, General Dynamics built the seven redesigned prototypes and modified existing, faulty test vehicles.
Overall, the White House wants $78 billion in cuts from the Pentagon over the next five years; those reductions would be in addition to the $100 billion in cost-savings that Gates recently directed the military services to come up with, funds that will be reinvested elsewhere in the Pentagon.