From Aviation Week

 

GD Keeps EFV, But Program Redrawn

Jun 8, 2007

Michael Bruno/Aerospace Daily & Defense Report

 

The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps will allow General Dynamics to keep the troubled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) program, but the Corps will dramatically scale back its future orders and restructure the contract to address award fees among other concerns, officials told reporters June 7 at the Pentagon.

 

The program now will seek only 573 EFVs, almost halved from 1,013 units previously, and officials have built in a delay of four to five years in the schedule.

 

Milestone C approval is slated for mid-2011, instead of last January, and full operational capability will not occur until 2025 compared with the last plan targeting 2020.

 

The estimate for the total program acquisition cost in future dollars of the restructured EFV program is $15.9 billion, officialss said. That compares with estimates of about $8.7 billion earlier in the 11-year-old effort, according to a Government Accountability Office report in May 2006 (DAILY, March 21).

 

The average procurement unit cost now is $21.6 million, up $4.2 million from the last Selected Acquisition Report and far more than an early $8.5 million price tag.

 

Altogether, the Defense Department has spent $1.8 billion for research, development, test and evaluation of the EFV since 1996, officials told reporters.

 

Officials promised increased Defense Contract Management Agency involvement in the EFV program and maintained that General Dynamics is boosting its systems engineering expertise. The Pentagon acquisition chief, the Navy acquisition chief and the General Dynamics chief executive also will meet quarterly over the EFV, they told reporters.

 

Considering all costs and the need to deliver the EFV, officials maintained that there was no good alternative but to continue with General Dynamics. Work under a "follow-on" system development and demonstration contract should occur under a cost-plus-incentive-fee structure with "very rigid, strict targets" versus a cost-plus award fee now.

 

"You're going to see a metamorphosis from what was previously a very autonomous program operating somewhat independently to a program that has a lot of help from DOD leadership," said Col. William Taylor, the new program executive officer for land systems.

 

Reliability

 

Under the restructured program, the Marines have sliced 750 pounds off the vehicle and leveraged another 1,000 pounds of "trade space" to meet reliability requirements, the cause of the EFV's troubles, Taylor said.

 

The changes also lower the sea state in which the EFV is designed to operate, from sea state three to two. Sea state refers to the amplitude and frequency of waves.

 

The first prototypes will be available in 2010 for testing and training.

 

Still, technology issues did drive the Nunn-McCurdy review of the EFV, Taylor said. EFV was one of a handful of programs more than 25 percent over their first estimated cost that had to be recertified recently by the Pentagon to Congress under Nunn-McCurdy requirements.

 

Officials said the EFV's cost breach has reached 43 percent, but the DOD vouches for the continued effort since the current Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAV), originally fielded in 1972, is aging and the Marines are trying to return to their emphasis on traditional landing-assault capabilities versus counterinsurgency operations such as in Iraq.

From Marine Corps Times

 

EFV setbacks concern House panel

By Kimberly Johnson - Staff writer

Posted : Saturday Jun 30, 2007 8:20:19 EDT

 

House lawmakers expressed shock over program delays and cost overruns plaguing the Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program at a recent hearing, but Marine officials said it’s still a necessity for the service.

 

The EFV, designed to replace the Corps’ aging amphibious assault vehicle, was initially slated to hit the fleet in 2010. However, earlier this year the vehicle’s launch was pushed back five years so designers could improve its reliability. Early test vehicles frequently broke down, and operators weren’t able to steer when accelerating in water.

 

Early estimates said each EFV would cost about $6 million, but those costs have risen to about $17 million per vehicle, making it “the most expensive ground combat vehicle in the history of the U.S. military,” said Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee on seapower and expeditionary forces, during a June 26 hearing.

 

“This program is going to cost more than three times what Congress was originally informed,” said Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., ranking subcommittee member. “If all goes well from here on out, system development and demonstration is going to take nearly twice as long as originally planned.”

 

Taylor said he was concerned about the EFV prototype’s poor performance in early testing and cited reports that the vehicle can operate only four to 10 hours before breaking down.

 

“I want to be very clear what this kind of reliability problem can mean for the Marines who will operate these vehicles: Going into combat in an armored vehicle that floats is dangerous enough, but if that same vehicle gets ashore — far from most maintenance support — and breaks down, the Marines on that vehicle could be extremely vulnerable,” Taylor said.

 

“I’m concerned that you continue to still have mechanical problems, that after [$2.3 billion] in taxpayer money, we have nine vehicles to test that break down,” Taylor said. “I haven’t heard anything today that gives me a degree of confidence that you’re addressing these problems.”

 

The program’s lackluster performance was brought on by funding decisions made more than a decade ago, defense officials said.

 

The program was not fully funded in the 1990s, said Roger Smith, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for expeditionary warfare. “The lack of systems engineering that was not performed was one of the main factors that caused the reliability to be so poor,” he said.

 

“In order to have successful execution of the certified EFV program, it is contingent upon receiving full funding requested in the president’s FY 2008 budget,” said David Ahern, the Pentagon’s director of portfolio systems acquisition.

 

Price overruns are a result of a broken acquisition system, one Corps official said.

 

“The process requires you to come up with the estimate before you even build the vehicles,” Col. William Taylor, program executive officer for Marine Corps Land Systems, told reporters after the hearing.

 

“They have to use analogies,” he said, such as with legacy vehicles like the AAVs and the M60 tank. “That’s like comparing a V-22 to a regular ol’ helicopter. The EFV is so much more complex than the existing combat vehicles. They underachieved in that estimate, by a significant amount.”

 

Designers probably would have “been better off comparing the complexities of this vehicle to an aircraft,” instead of other combat vehicles with simpler designs, Taylor said.

 

Lawmakers pressed Corps officials to justify the need for such a vehicle.

 

“It’s been a long while since Marines en masse stormed a beach,” Bartlett said.

 

“Why do we need the EFV? The EFV is essential to the nation’s forcible entry capability,” said Lt. Gen. Emerson Gardner, deputy commandant for programs and resources. “Without the EFV, the U.S. does not have the ability to conduct surfaced assaults from ships over the horizon.”

 

The EFV is one piece of the service’s vehicle portfolio, he said, explaining that the Corps decided to cut its EFV requirement from more than 1,000 vehicles to 573 as it increased requests for armored wheeled vehicles.

 

“We have to be organized, trained and equipped to do a multitude of missions,” Gardner said.

 

Without the EFV, the Corps must rely on antiquated amtracs, which must be launched about 5,000 yards from shore, Gardner said.

 

“You’re taking risks with those ships coming in that close, so the Marine commander has to persuade the naval commander that he needs to take that risk with those ships to push those vehicles out,” he said.

 

Lawmakers balked at the EFV’s flat-bottom design and urged the Corps to pursue a heavily armored V-shaped hull, similar to the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles the service is pushing out to Iraq as Humvee replacements.

 

“I am having some trouble understanding why making it with a V-bottom would make it less like a boat,” Bartlett said. “Most every boat I’ve seen going fast on the water has a V-bottom, rather than a flat bottom.”

 

The EFV’s flat bottom — a necessity for getting the vehicle up on plane for high-speed water maneuvering — is not ideal for armoring against roadside bombs, Gardner explained.

 

“However, the side protection of the vehicle does provide the kind of force protection we’re seeing with vehicles today,” he said.

From Aviation Week's ARES Blog

 

FCS, DD(X), F-22, Deepwater ... is EFV Next?

Posted by Michael Bruno at 8/4/2008 12:18 PM CDT

 

Each of the U.S. armed services seems to have had a major - if not their biggest - acquisition program rescaled in recent months as Defense Secretary Gates and budget pressures collide to challenge the military on these monstrous efforts. Everyone, that is, but the Marine Corps - and its Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) could be just the juicy target Pentagon reformers and electioneering lawmakers will address next.

 

What makes me think of this is that the Pentagon on Friday said the Marine Corps Systems Command awarded EFV prime contractor General Dynamics Land Systems a $766.8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for development and manufacture of two EFV prototypes under a so-called system development and demonstration-2 phase. The contractor also will modify existing EFV prototypes, procure preliminary spares and repair parts, long lead materials for the SDD-2 prototypes, and conduct systems engineering, studies and analysis, logistics support and test support.

 

The contract, which was not competitively awarded, is for work that won't be completed until September 2012. And notice they're calling it "SDD-2," as in the second attempt at it. That's because about a year ago, the Navy and Marines rewrote the program - and had to hike the cost by billions of dollars while slashing expected deliveries in half and pushing back the timeline by years.

 

Surprisingly, in my opinion, that announcement didn't draw much attention at the time. At least not for what it was: declaring the Corps' top acquisition effort a failure (although one necessary to keep pursuing). This year, things changed; the House Government Oversight Committee spotlighted the program in a surprise move April 29 and the panel's scathing hearing came shortly after yet another, critical Government Accountability Office report March 31. Most recently, the House and Senate Armed Services committees have weighed in with increasing concern themselves.

 

Under current plans, the EFV will not achieve initial operational capability until 2015 and full operational capability until 2025 - or about 35 years after the EFV program entered development. The SASC bill says the plan puts "the Marine Corps' primary mission capability - amphibious operations - at risk for an unacceptably long duration." Senators want the Pentagon to seriously consider spending toward an annual production rate far beyond the one limited to 55 vehicles per year once full-rate production begins in 2016.

 

The HASC, meanwhile, is concerned that plans to begin fabrication of the new EFV prototypes in fiscal 2009 have not sufficiently addressed protection from mines and improvised explosive devices in some operational scenarios. In their House-passed bill, they cut authorized spending for research and development by $40.2 million to $275.9 million.

 

The two bills seem to go in opposite directions, but they also show growing pressure on the program to perform and produce despite its major setback. EFV may have benefited from less attention before, but perhaps its time in the spotlight is coming.