By Carlo Munoz
The Navy plans to blend its legacy modernization work and new platform development plans for its amphibious combat vehicle fleet into a single effort, in an attempt to expedite the service’s transition into the follow-on to its canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) program.
The plan, according to Navy acquisition chief Sean Stackley, will be to place management of the service’s ongoing life extension work on the Marine Corps Amphibious Assault Vehicle, oversight of additional buys of the Marine Personnel Carrier and initial development of a new amphibious vehicle under a “tactical vehicle” lead within the service.
Under such an approach, all three efforts would essentially be managed “as [if] they were a single program,” he said after his speech at an Aviation Week-sponsored defense technology symposium yesterday in Washington.
The move, he added, simply made sense due to the close connection between all three efforts. Plans to modernize the current AAV fleet and extend MPC buys, which had already been planned, were intended to bridge the gap for the Marine Corps, until the EFV was fielded.
But with the Defense Department’s decision to cancel EFV earlier this year, Stackley said combining the AAV and MPC plans to service efforts to develop an EFV replacement not only made sense, but could also expedite that new replacement effort. General Dynamics [GD] is the prime contractor for EFV.
By consolidating the three programs, Navy procurement officials could essentially “truncate the front end” of the acquisition effort for the new amphibious vehicle, since program leaders in each effort could share information and lessons learned easier, which could then feed into the requirements development and design process for the EFV replacement.
To that end, Marine Corps acquisition officials plan to issue a request for information (RFI) to industry for the follow-on EFV vehicle as soon as this week, Assistant Marine Commandant Gen. Joseph Dunford said on Tuesday at the same conference.
With the release of the RFI, Marine Corps officials anticipate reaching initial operating capability for the new amphibious vehicle within the next four to seven years. That estimated timeline is roughly half the time DoD officials expect the new vehicle to hit Initial Operating Capability (IOC), which according to department budget officials would be 2024.
For his part, Stackley said neither he nor his office was ready to pin an estimated IOC time to the new program, noting it was too early in the process to do so. However, he did not dismiss outright the Marine Corps claims a new EFV could be battle ready by 2017.
After excessive cost overruns and schedule setbacks in the program, Defense Secretary Robert Gates axed the EFV as a way to garner $35 billion in savings within the Navy and redistribute those dollars into more urgent warfighter needs. That $35 billion was also part of a larger, DoD-wide effort spearheaded by Gates to generate $100 billion in cost savings over the next five years.