CAMP PENDLETON – On a cool day in late June, the Marines asked local media to board this seaside base and learn more about a new 80,000-pound hulking war machine – the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle or EFV.
They handed out information packets with glossy brochures, touting the $16.7 million amphibious machine as far more lethal, agile and sophisticated than the current assault vehicle, now nearly 40 years in service.
A video promo for the EFV ended with a slide of these words from Commandant Gen. James Conway: “The EFV is essential to the Marine Corps mission. There are programs that are absolutely and vitally important. One of those is our EFV.”
It was a polished presentation and the Marine Corps will need its best sales pitch with prototypes currently being tested. In a tough economy, the Corps is trying to sell the beast of a vehicle, first to the American people, and second, to members of Congress, who ultimately will write the check for it.
The price tag is steep: $13 billion for the entire program with detractors already having put the fighting machine in the crosshairs. And, immersed in land-locked battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Marine Corps itself stands at a crossroads.
If approved, the hulking ship-to-shore vehicle would solidify the amphibious future of the Corps.
If rejected, it raises the question: Will the Marines be rendered another land army?
TURNING POINT
A single war fighting machine will not make or break a force America has relied on for generations, one that solidified its image as an amphibious powerhouse during World War II and continued to build on it following the Korean War.
Experts and members of Congress appreciate that the two wars being fought today are very different than those America has fought in the past. But some raise questions about pursuing a vehicle program two decades in the making built around a war machine that, despite its sophistications, time may have left behind.
The EFV program manager Col. Keith Moore put it this way during the June tour: “We haven’t sunk anything with a torpedo since probably the Second World War. I don’t think we’re saying we don’t need to make torpedoes anymore.”
The Marines are reasserting their amphibious role – as demonstrated in a massive Camp Pendleton beach landing exercise earlier this summer, the first since 2001. But their very flexibility, their roles in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last seven years, and a weak economy, may be working against their amphibious ethos.
“Some people would tell you that we can do expeditionary warfare without the vehicle in question,” Loren Thompson, a defense analyst for the Lexington Institute. “Short answer to that is if you don’t have the EFV, a lot of Marines would (get) killed.”
The debate is full throttle on whether the Marines might need to go back to the drawing board on the EFV – a vehicle whose ability in the water also makes it more vulnerable to threats on land – and what kind of amphibious operations capability does America really need?
ARE AMPHIBIOUS OPERATIONS OBSOLETE?
Gates is scrutinizing every aspect of the military in his search for roughly $100 billion in savings in the next five years to sustain the combat force and invest in its modernization.
He has raised questions about whether amphibious skills are becoming outdated in an era marked by landlocked conflict in places like Afghanistan and when enemy anti-ship technology has become increasingly sophisticated, making beach invasions much more difficult to pull off.
“On a more basic level, in the 21st century, what kind of amphibious capability do we really need to deal with the most likely scenarios, and then how much?” Gates asked military leaders in a speech in May at the Navy League.
He has not directly addressed the EFV but defense analysts generally believe that his comments do not bode well for the program.
In his most recent speech directly addressing Marine Corps needs earlier this month in San Francisco, Gates appeared to stress the importance of the Corps, “its maritime soul” and the necessity of operations from the sea.
“The Marines unique ability to project combat forces from the sea under uncertain circumstances – forces quickly able to protect and sustain themselves – is a capability that America has needed in this past decade, and will require in the future,” he said.
Still, “Looking ahead, I do think it is proper to ask whether large-scale amphibious assault landings along the lines of Inchon are feasible. New anti-ship missiles with long range and high accuracy may make it necessary to debark from ships 25, 40 or 60 or more miles at sea,” he said.
Gates said he has ordered a review of the future role of the Marine Corps amid “anxiety” that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had turned the service into a “second land army.”
EFV IN THE CROSSHAIRS
Analysts say not to underestimate the Corps’ ability to sell its plan and get the funding necessary from Congress.
“There was a Marine Corps before the EFV and there will be a Marine Corps after the EFV,” said Peter Singer, a senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.
The uncertainty about the program’s future can be attributed to several factors: questions of costs, the EFV’s survivability in contemporary and likely future combat zones, a squeezed budget environment and its hobbled history of development, he said.
“Dick Cheney was the toughest operator around and he wasn’t able to kill the Osprey,” said Singer, referring to the Marine helicopter program that the former vice president tried to end in 1989 when he was defense secretary, saying the aircraft were unnecessary. But the Marines persuaded Congress to authorize the funds.
Dakota Wood, a retired Marine who is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington D.C., says that after 20 years to get to the EFV’s testing and development stage, the vehicle’s high speed precludes it from having the desired design qualities.
“So this is the conundrum the Marine Corps has to deal with,” Wood said, “They have spent years designing the vehicle that may not be viable in today’s combat environment. The manufacturer has given the vehicle they asked for. The criticism now is that is the requirement document out of date?”
CORPS THINKING
Lt. Gen. George Flynn, who leads the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in Quantico, Va., said to have amphibious capability and to use the sea for military maneuvers, the Corps needs an “amphibious tractor.”
The command, home of the Marine Corps doctrine, is where systems are developed, from uniforms to combat boots, to developing equipment and fighting tools for the force with direction from the commandant.
“This isn’t about a program, (but) about a capability,” Flynn said. “We see in Secretary Gates speech last week that he sees (a need for) that today and tomorrow. It’s not one thing that’s going to define the Marine Corps. It’s this forward deployed crisis response force that defines it. We believe that we’re America’s 911 force.”
He reiterated what he and the commandant have said in congressional testimony that if the EFV is not performing up to the set benchmarks during testing, they’d be willing to cancel the program. The next “knowledge points” about the EFV will be based on 500 hours of operations to be completed by the end of January.
USA Today reported that Gates said last year that the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle’s flat bottom reflected “no lessons learned” from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and that IEDs were likely to be used against U.S. forces in any future war.
Flynn answers that the EFV is a primary fighting machine and not designed to be a transport vehicle in a heavy IED area. The vehicle has to considered as one part of the overall ground combat tactical strategy, he said.
“I think I am not trying to sell a program,” Flynn said. “I am more concerned about delivering a capability to the American people. The key part here is that the nation needs the ability to come from the sea. Now we have to make that capability affordable.”
Flynn stressed what other Marines have also said – many amphibious operations have been overlooked because of the landlocked battles that the U.S. has been fighting in recent years.
Marines and other naval forces have conducted amphibious operations at least 100 times in the last 25 years around the globe, including Liberia, Grenada, various times in Lebanon and in several areas of the Western Pacific for disaster relief, officials said.
THE RIGHT VEHICLE?
The fate of the EFV rests in the hands of lawmakers and the discussion on Capitol Hill of the war machine – and eventually whether to fund it – will likely begin in earnest sometime following the November election.
The Register contacted eight members of Congress for comment, including those on the Senate and House armed services and appropriations committees; two agreed to be interviewed for this story.
Rep. Sanchez of Santa Ana has served on the House Armed Services Committee since 1997 and chairs the Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.
The questions that need to be considered, she said, are these: Do the Marines need an amphibious vehicle and, then, is the EFV the right choice?
Sanchez said the “Question is how many amphibious landings will the Marines be doing in the future? What does the war look like in the future?”
The Armed Services Committee is the policy making committee which usually passes one bill a year, reflecting the policy issues for the military. The defense subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee works with that blueprint to allocate money. The full House and Senate each vote on a policy bill and a funding bill.
Another question to be answered is that the EFV “has so many problems, can we really build to the specifications that the Marines think they need?” said Sanchez, adding that the biggest issue “many of us have is the vehicle has a flat hull. The deadliest killer of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is the IED.”
V-hull shaped vehicles are being fielded by the military because they better deflect roadside bombs.
Republican Rep. Ken Calvert of Corona, whose district includes San Clemente, is a former member of the House Armed Services Committee and is a ranking member of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel of the House Committee on Appropriations.
He believes that it’s critical for the nation to maintain amphibious capability because if it is voluntarily taken that off the table, it only simplifies the choices for the opponent.
So, the Marines need some type of amphibious capability but “you don’t want to build the wrong vehicle.”
“I am not arguing against (the EFV). I may be arguing against the one they’re proposing right now and it’s got to have a pretty good range and at least be resistant to IEDs,” he said. “Let’s face it, the Marines did not land on the beach in Iraq and Afghanistan … (but) I don’t deny we need amphibious capability.”
THE BUSINESS CASE
The Marines are seeking some 575 of the vehicles that could end up being fielded by 2016. Marines have been testing the prototypes, built by General Dynamics Land Systems, for about four years.
The Government Accountability Office in its recent report titled “The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program faces costs, schedule and performance risks,” concluded that “the program’s history of cost growth, schedule slips and performance failures and the current challenges (including changing threats) raise the question of whether the business case for the EFV program (in terms of cost, schedule, and performance) is still sound.”
Pete Hammer, a retired Marine who’s the president of the Dana Point 5th Marine Regiment Support Group, says what he learned from his service and in dealing with those are currently serving, is to expect the unexpected.
“In terms of the arsenal we’d have to have available to us, we’d definitely want to retain some sort of amphibious landing capability,” he said. “What form that would take would be up to the DOD and commandant of the Marine Corps.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
