The Marines are about to move out sharply with their once-stalled Amphibious Combat Vehicle, the smallest service’s biggest program. After years of uncertainty and a last-minute change of course that came too late to make it into the administration’s budget request for 2015, the Marines will soon announce their new strategy for something they’re calling an ACV. It will be much more modest than the revolutionary Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle the Corps once envisioned…

What the USMC won’t be getting – the Advanced Amphibious Combat Vehicle; aka., the Expeditionary Combat Vehicle.  (source: Wikipedia)

“We are doing well with the ACV,” Marine Commandant Gen. James Amos said at the Atlantic Council Tuesday afternoon. “We are about to go public with the way forward on it. It’s affordable, ladies and gentlemen, it’s doable, and we can have our cake and eat it too here. So we’re pretty excited about it.”

Amos was short on details at the event and slipped into the elevator a step ahead of pursuing journalists afterwards. But his staff referred me to Manny Pacheco, spokesman for the Marine Corps’s Program Executive Office (PEO) Land Systems.

The not-quite-final plan:

• Buy 200 to 600 armored troop transports as a Phase 1 ACV. These will be modified versions of an existing US or foreign design, not an all-new vehicle. They’ll also have only limited amphibious capability: enough to cross a river or coastal inlet, but not necessarily enough to move from a ship at sea to the beach on their own power. They will probably have to be carried on some kind of landing craft. ACV 1 is essentially a re-envisioned and resurrected Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC), a program which was canceled just last year.
• Upgrade about 390 of the current AAV-7 Amphibious Assault Vehicles. These 1970s-vintage vehicles, descendants of the World War II amtrac, can move from ship to shore on their own power but have proven dangerously vulnerable to roadside bombs. A contract for the first set of “limited survivability upgrades” will be announced in the next 30 to 60 days, Pacheco told me.
• Research a future “high water speed” option — an “ACV 2.0″ – which may be an all-new and fully amphibious vehicle, a landing craft to carry the ACV 1, or something entirely different. Said Pacheco, “that’s not a procurement, it’s more in the R&D realm.”

The Marine Personnel Carrier demonstrator – the rough equivalent to the US Army’s Stryker vehicle.  (source: Wikipedia)

Rear view of the MPC demonstrator – its blast-resistant, V-shaped hull is highlighted.  (source: Wikipedia)

“We were talking to some [congressional] staffers last week and things were changing just as we were talking,” Pacheco told me in a Tuesday evening phone call, “but I’d venture to say we’re pretty close to making some announcement.”

What Pacheco laid out was the most refined and detailed form I’ve seen so far of the Marines’ new multi-phase, multi-vehicle approach.

The first step has to be making the existing AAV-7 more robust, Pacheco said. That means those “limited survivability upgrades,” such as blast-resistant seats and additional armor, which may require a new transmission to handle the extra weight. But only about 390 of the more than 1,000 AAV-7s in service will get the upgrades. There is no current plan for a fleet-wide overhaul or a service-life extension program (SLEP) for the aging vehicles.

A USMC AAV-7 in Fallujah, Iraq in 2007.  (source: Wikipedia)

The next step is what the Marines are calling “ACV 1.1.” This will not be an all-new vehicle but rather a “non-developmental item,” that is a modification of an existing US or foreign design. It also probably won’t be able to swim from ship to shore under its own power, instead requiring some kind of landing craft.

“It won’t go from the ship to the shore on its own — at least at this point right now,” Pacheco told me. “I know at least one vendor who claims they’ve deployed their vehicle from the back of an amphib, [but] we have not tested that.”

A “fully developed acquisition strategy” for ACV 1.1 will take a little longer, Pacheco said. But the Marines’ deputy commandant for “combat development & integration,” Lt. Gen. Kenneth Glueck, is currently finalizing the detailed requirements that will allow the Marines to write a Request For Proposals and start a formal competition. (Glueck happens to be testifying before Congress on Wednesday morning, when we may hear more).

That ACV 1.1 competition would be for about 200 basic troop transports. If that goes well, the Marines will expand the program to an ACV 1.2, buying up to an additional 400 vehicles in multiple variants: not just personnel carriers but also, say, a mobile command post or a fire support vehicle that trades passenger capacity for bigger weapons.

If a company can offer an ACV 1 that can swim from ship to shore without a landing craft, that capability would “absolutely” be a major plus, Pacheco said — but it’s not going to be a requirement. That, in turn, is why it’s crucial to keep the AAV-7s viable, since those can self-deploy from the ship.

Meanwhile, research and development will continue on faster means of crossing the water. “That would be ACV 2.0,” said Pacheco. “There’s some things out there that the Marine Corps wants to keep pursuing…. to see what’s in the realm of the possible… to get us to an affordable high-water-speed ACV.” But right now such a vehicle, whatever it might be, looks like an idea for the indefinitely distant future.

Until the ACV 2.0 comes along, the USMC’s current fleet of AAV-7′s will continue to soldier on.  (source: Wikipedia)

Some critics of the Marine Corps have questioned why the service needs this kind of capability at all. The last opposed landing by amphibious armored vehicles came during the Korean War, they argue, and in an era of increasingly long-range anti-ship and anti-tank missiles, even a high-water-speed landing force is unlikely to reach the beach alive. But the Marines see the ability to move from ship to shore and on inland as central to their mission — and not just in major wars.

When 6,000 Marines aboard seven Navy amphibious ships responded to the Haiti earthquake of 2010, Gen. Amos said today, “there wasn’t one ounce of combat involved.” But the Navy ships couldn’t enter Haiti’s damaged ports — which had been in bad shape even before the quake — and tie up at the pier. Nor could helicopters carry the sheer volume of relief supplies required. Instead, the operation relied on AAV-7s, he said: “all those amphibious tractors that swam ashore and swam back every day and carried fuel, water, medical supplies, people back out to the ships,” Amos said.

In fact, “I think the bulk of [the] forces in my service are what we call general purpose, applicable across the range of military operations” from humanitarian aid to major war, Amos went on. A Navy-Marine amphibious task force is “the Swiss Army Knife of the Department of Defense,” he said, using one of his favorite phrases. (And, by the way, “our United States Navy needs more money for ships,” he added). “If you want to hand out humanitarian supplies or food or rescue people, you bring in an amphibious ship full of marines and sailors,” he said. ” They can also make a forcible entry landing some place [with] the exact same force.”

“The standard-issue United States Marine… is trained as a rifleman first and can hand out water, can hand out diapers,” Amos said, citing recent relief efforts in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan last fall and in Japan after the 2011 earthquake.

Amos’s problem is paying for enough Marines with enough training and enough modern equipment to handle this wide range of missions. “Yes, we can do the same with less, but there’s a price to be paid for that,” he said. For example, the Marines have been raiding equipment and base maintenance funds to pay for training, fuel, spare parts, and other immediate operational needs.

The automatic budget cuts known as sequestration are “forcing us to sacrifice our long-term health for near-term readiness,” Amos said. “I can’t continue to do this for forever.” Around 2017, he said, the next Commandant will probably have to cut back readiness to keep alive programs like the Amphibious Combat Vehicle.

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