Seapower - September 2007

Sink or Swim
Marine Corps’ EFV averts cancellation, but the program faces
budget pressure, performance stipulations and increased scrutiny

By OTTO KREISHER, Special Correspondent

Off-Track

Just when the Marine Corps finally has its top aviation system — the MV- 22 Osprey — ready for combat deployment after two decades of turmoil, its highest-priority ground system has had another serious setback, pushing its already delayed operational availability back by possibly another five years.

And the recently announced restructuring of the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle’s (EFV) development schedule is replete with “off-ramps” that would allow the government to abandon the program if the high-tech amphibious troop transport experiences additional problems, said Marine Corps Col. William Taylor, the veteran acquisition executive given the task of rescuing the chronically troubled project.

But Taylor said he was “convinced,” based on the extensive review of the EFV completed in June, that the program will improve.

That conclusion was shared by Peter Keating, spokesman for General Dynamics Land Systems, Sterling Heights, Mich., which has been trying since 1996 to prove it can make the huge leap in capability that the new vehicle is supposed to provide.

“Our view is that the review was good. It definitely brought out some important facts,” Keating said. “Going

forward, we think the program’s going to benefit from that.”

The review was a high-level, four-month scrutinizing of the EFV concept and its development program, which had the project on the verge of cancellation. It was triggered by a 43 percent cost growth that violated the Nunn-McCurdy congressional cost-control act.

The law required Kenneth Krieg, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and logistics, to decide if he could justify spending more of the taxpayers’ money on top of the $1.8

billion already sunk into the EFV. To
do that, he had to answer four questions, said Anthony
Melita, director of land warfare programs under Krieg:
■ Was the EFV essential to national security?

■ Were there less expensive alternatives to meet the requirements?

■ Are the new estimates of program cost reasonable? ■ Is the management structure able to control cost?

“The bottom line” of the review was that the amphibious vehicle was essential to national security and “there were no alternatives that would provide equal or greater military capabilities at equal or less cost,” Melita said.

Krieg also accepted the revised program cost estimate — now $15.9 billion, compared with the original project price tag of $7.1 billion. But he ordered greatly tightened government supervision to help keep the program on track, and he “set up off-ramps along the way so if the program doesn’t work out, we can get off,” Taylor said.

But the EFV still must pass another critical review: whether Congress will continue funding the program at a time of growing pressure on the defense budget. The initial actions in the fiscal 2008 authorizations were not encouraging, with the House Armed Services Committee cutting $200 million from the $288 million EFV budget request and the Senate panel cutting $100 million.

Already a decade in the works and billions of dollars over budget, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) may have its operational availability pushed back by as much as five years.