Can the EFV survive? - Marine Corps News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Marine Corps Times

Can the EFV survive?

It’s back to the drawing board for the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle.

The multibillion dollar program, designed to deliver combat-ready Marines from Navy ships to enemy shores aboard amphibious, armored personnel carriers, is so over-budget and behind schedule that it has been blasted as an “embarrassment” on Capitol Hill and identified as a poster child for troubled military acquisitions projects.

Widespread technical failures caused the Corps to scrap its existing plans two years ago and restart the program’s entire development and demonstration phase, a move that cost nearly $1 billion. But Marine Corps Systems Command is pushing forward with the creation of seven new prototypes while testing continues on existing vehicles in an attempt to head off future problems.

Marine officials say the program has turned a corner, but critics insist the EFV’s time has passed. It’s a money pit, they say, an engineering stinker that will consume about a quarter of the Corps’ research and development budget through 2014.

Even if does better next time around in operational assessments, analysts question whether the development of an amphibious vehicle without a V-shaped hull — favored for deflecting roadside-bomb blasts — makes sense, when there is no apparent need for amphibious raids on the Pentagon’s horizon.

“It was a great idea when it was conceived, but the operational environment has changed,” said retired Lt. Col. Dakota Wood, now a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “There’s an element both within and outside the Marine Corps that agrees it’s time to cancel the EFV program.”

Overall, the System Development and Demonstration phase already has cost more than $1.2 billion, with nearly $1 billion more expected to be spent by 2011, according to a 2008 report by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The complete cost of the program has jumped from about $8.4 billion in 2000 to about $13 billion this year, even though the number of vehicles to be purchased was slashed almost in half, from 1,013 to 573. Widespread fielding isn’t expected until 2015 at the earliest, 12 years behind the initial schedule.

The downward spiral

It wasn’t always this way. When the Corps awarded a contract to General Dynamics in 1996 to begin developing a replacement for the amphibious assault vehicle, it was viewed as a potentially revolutionary ride that would take Marines ashore at speeds of up to 29 mph, from up to 65 miles away. In comparison, AAVs travel up to 8.2 mph on water, from up to 56 miles away.

Marine officials and hundreds of General Dynamics employees moved in together in a 62,000 square-foot former electronics store in Woodbridge, Va., winning praise for cutting down on costs and improving communication. The program won Defense Department acquisitions awards in 1998 and 2000, with the Pentagon citing it for successfully developing several cost-saving measures, including some that came during the development of a new Mk-46 medium-caliber machine gun.

In July 2001, the Corps awarded a contract worth up to $712 million for the development of the vehicle — then known as the advanced amphibious assault vehicle, or Triple-AV — to General Dynamics. The agreement called for the contractor and the Corps to work out any kinks in prototypes by October 2003, with initial operating capability planned for 2006.

Things began unraveling early into the development and demonstration phase. According to reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the Corps delayed the project’s completion date three times between November 2002 and March 2005 as numerous components failed in reliability tests.

Ultimately, General Dynamics was paid $1.2 billion under the contract, including $60 million in bonuses and fees for good performance, a 2008 congressional report said.

The GAO and Defense Department auditors blamed the EFV shortfalls on a variety of factors, including the adoption of an unrealistic schedule that rushed production, skipping a comprehensive design process in favor of having General Dynamics fix problems in a piecemeal fashion and not appointing an overall system engineer.

In a pivotal moment, the EFV failed a milestone operational assessment on numerous levels in 2006. According to Defense Department and congressional reports, the assessment was “dominated by very low reliability,” where the vehicle was able to operate only 4.5 hours between breakdowns, with 3.6 hours of corrective maintenance needed for every hour in use. Reviewers completed only two of the 11 amphibious tests and one of the 10 gunnery tests, and the gun turret support arm broke free during the assessment.

Commandant Gen. James Conway said he “will never understand” how some of the problems occurred, particularly leading up to the operational assessment.

“When we did reliability tests on those things three or so years ago, we used vehicles that were past their service life expectancy to do reliability tests, and that’s just not smart,” Conway said. “That doesn’t start being smart, that provides predictable results, and we’ve been living with them now ever since.”

Starting over

The Corps reviewed the program after the operational assessment failures in 2006, said Col. Keith Moore, named EFV program manager in August after serving as the program’s director of test and evaluation for about a year.

In a recent interview at the General Dynamics Amphibious Systems facility in Virginia, Moore said program officials predicted the EFV could make it about 10 or 11 hours between breakdowns, heading into the 2006 operational assessment — substantially below the Corps’ requirement of 43.5 hours but a more manageable number than 4.5.

But the 2006 assessment showed other, bigger problems in the EFV’s design than Marine officials were aware of initially, Moore said. For example, designers were struggling with aspects of the gun turret’s engineering, but it had never broken free from the vehicle’s support arms.

“We had never seen that in [developmental testing], something quite to that extreme, but we could go back and find places where we had warped floors and things like that,” Moore said.

Further review showed that there were a variety of weaknesses in the weapon system, which features a 30mm cannon. Loaded with ammunition, a vehicle commander and a gunner, the turret could not withstand the impacts the EFV sustained while navigating large waves and bumpy terrain.

“What we found is that with the shocks and the loads you were putting on [the turret basket], you were actually bending the turret floor,” Moore said. “It would then pull on the feed chutes for the ammo, which would cause the ammo to jam so that you couldn’t even use the main gun.”

The answer was to reinforce it with a few more pounds of metal, Moore said. Engineers also redesigned the feed chute, giving it more flexibility so that it could withstand more strain “without damaging the ammunition or pulling the ammunition out of kilter.”

Other worrisome aspects of the vehicle, such as hydraulics and electronics, also were reviewed. In some cases, engineers removed troublesome parts and components such as valves and circuit cards, finding another way to complete tasks. In other cases, redundant systems were added, giving the vehicle a backup plan if something failed in operation.

In December, the EFV program underwent a critical design review that assessed whether the program was meeting requirements for cost, schedule and performance. It was given the green light to continue, with General Dynamics overseeing the production of five new personnel carrier and two new command vehicle variants over the next year.

The company expects to deliver the new prototypes on time and move into production in December 2012, company spokesman Karl Oskoian said. There are two variants: one that holds 17 combat-ready Marines, and a “command variant” that holds eight Marines and an extensive amount of communications gear, company officials said.

All told, the new prototypes will include 400 engineering design improvements stemming from the work done to improve the vehicle’s reliability.

Moore said General Dynamics was able to provide the Corps with a “pretty well-balanced design” that has a predicted system reliability of about 61 hours before operational mission failure. The Corps expects the new prototypes to last about 19 hours in between breakdown when they first receive them, which would put the requirement of 43.5 hours before breakdown within reach for the final product, Moore said.

In the next year, Marines can expect to see EFVs performing riverine and weapons tests at Camp Lejeune, N.C., along with evaluations at the amphibious test branch at Camp Pendleton, Calif., where the vehicle has spent the majority of its life, Moore said.

Still a hard sell

The EFV still has plenty of detractors, however, especially those wondering how a vehicle conceived in the 1990s will ward off this decade’s greatest threat — improvised explosive devices — with a flat-bottomed, aluminum hull.

Marine officials maintain that because the EFV is so much lower to the ground than a mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle and needs to float, using a blast-shielding, V-shaped hull is all but impossible, responding to concerns raised in 2007 prominently by Reps. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., and Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., members of the House Armed Services seapower and expeditionary forces subcommittee.

Conway said the Corps had its EFV engineers sit down with the congressmen to explain its position, and “I think convinced them” that the vehicle cannot perform well with a V-shaped bottom.

“It’s not your daddy’s bass boat, OK?” Conway said. “It doesn’t get up on plane [in the water] with that kind of bottom, so a flat bottom is necessary in that vehicle.”

But Taylor and Bartlett still have mixed feelings about the program.

“While I understand the Marine Corps’ desire for the EFV, I would still like to see more protection against IEDs on the vehicle before it goes into production,” Taylor said through a spokeswoman.

Bartlett could not be reached for comment while he was traveling to southwest Asia, but spokeswoman Lisa Wright said the program remains a concern. “His positions haven’t changed,” Wright said.

Moore said the Corps is developing a concept in which bolt-on armor could be installed on the bottom of an EFV in dangerous land conditions, but that could not be used in a full amphibious assault because it would slow down the vehicle on water.

Instead, Marines would land with EFVs, secure the shoreline, then either bolt an up-armor kit onto the vehicles on land or send in follow-on EFVs with armor kits installed to head further inland. If the armor was installed on the beachhead, it likely would be delivered by airlift or air-cushioned landing craft.

The Corps is still developing the bolt-on armor, and it will take additional funding to purchase kits for testing, Moore said. The goal is to achieve the same level of blast protection as a tank or the Buffalo variant of the MRAP.

“We’re still working on the design, as far as how much it will weigh and how it will go on and what the ultimate protection is going to be, but we believe that we can get a kit that will still allow us to do all of the land mobility and have some capability to do low-speed water operations,” Moore said.

EFV critics say the bolt-on armor is another example of the vehicle not having a clear mission or purpose. If the armor can be delivered by LCAC and aircraft such as the MV-22 Osprey, so can Marines, they point out.

“If the argument is that I must get my force ashore and then I pause to let something else ferry in armor ... there would seem to be a disconnect there,” Wood said.

Given that Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress recently that he’d prefer to see programs plagued with cost overruns canceled, rather than reducing acquisitions funding across the board, the EFV could be on the chopping block, said Philip Coyle, an analyst for the Center for Defense Information and former assistant secretary of defense and top tester at the Pentagon.

“As Secretary Gates said so pointedly in his testimony [to Congress], the U.S. military is better at planning future wars than sustaining long, continuing current battles,” Coyle said. “The EFV sort of falls into that category. It’s something for a future war, when the question is, what does the Marine Corps need for the conflicts it’s in?”

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman declined to comment, but Conway rejected the notion that the EFV is in danger.

“We’re optimistic that once people understand the facts and understand that the United States Navy is not going closer than 25 miles to a shore, they’ll appreciate the value of a vehicle that is really an armored personnel carrier that also planes at about 30 knots over open ocean,” Conway said. “We think that the program is absolutely necessary to what we do.”