By February, the latest round of tests for the Marine Corps’ much-delayed Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle — a tank that gets Marines ashore from a ship — ought to be complete. And the corps better hope the so-called swimming tank passes, because it doesn’t have a replacement.
Three years ago, after Pentagon acquisition officials decided not to kill the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle during a review of its ballooning costs, the corps asked engineers if alternative technologies or designs were mature enough to use. “At the time we did that re-certification, there was nothing out there,” Lieutenant General George Flynn, the leader of the Marines’ Combat Development Command, told reporters Tuesday. “We have not done anything since then that tells me if there’s anything else out there.”
It might be time to start looking. After years of delays and cost overruns, Senate appropriators voted in September to put the $24-million-per-tank EFV program out to pasture if it can’t pass its final round of tests. The chairmen of the White House deficit commission marked it for termination in their cost-cutting proposal last week. At this point, the swimming tank is a pinata for defense reformers: Another member of the commission, Alice Rivlin, is going to release a different plan for trimming the defense budget tomorrow; we’ll see if the swimming-tank is on her chopping block, too.
But a September study from the Government Accountability Office found few alternatives to the swimming tank (.PDF). Either the Marines could continue to use their decades-old Amphibious Assault Vehicles, or they can modify their planned Marine Personnel Carrier for ship-to-shore operations. (One option for the carrier, GAO writes, is the Italian Supernav 8×8 tank, “a 24-ton vehicle that can carry 13 Marines and their equipment and can travel up to 500 miles nonstop on land and 40 miles on water.”) But the carrier won’t be ready until 2015 as it is.
From Commandant James Amos on down, though, the Corps insists it’s not married to the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle per se. But it is married to idea that it remain able to fight on both sea and land, so it’ll need some armored vehicle that can get Marines onto an enemy beach.
“What is crucial is the ability to be able to come from the surface and to be able to do a seamless transition from the maritime domain to the land domain. And that requires you, then, to have some kind of amphibious vehicle that is a tracked vehicle,” said Flynn, who helps determine the Corps’ requirements for its future weapons, vehicles, sensors and training. “That is the requirement and that is what is key… The capability is what is important.”
As it happens, the Senate appropriators’ repudiation of the EFV may not actually become law. The House Armed Services Committee’s incoming chairman, Representative Buck McKeon, expressed doubt yesterday that Congress will actually pass a defense bill this year. But that wouldn’t stop the calls for canceling the tank.
Update, 1:25 p.m.: Sure enough, another member of the White House deficit commission, Rep. Jan Schakowsky of Illinois, takes the budgetary axe to the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.
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