The Marine Corps is caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place when it comes to recapitalizing its tactical vehicle fleet.
Officials say the Corps needs billions of dollars to repair and replace battle-worn vehicles and to modernize its fleet with humvee-like trucks with V-shaped hulls to offer better protection from roadside bombs. Not only is funding hard to come by, but also the technology that officials are banking on to replace the outdated humvee is not yet ready.
The joint light tactical vehicle, or JLTV, has been the service’s choice to replace the 25-year old humvee. Originally conceived as a 13,000-pound vehicle that could be picked up by a heavy lift helicopter, the JLTV would have a V-shaped hull, like those found on the 14-plus-ton mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) trucks.
The Marine Corps was hoping for ceramic armor and a host of other advancements that would give personnel encapsulated vehicles with increased mobility and protection. But the technology is still in its infancy and too heavy, which means that the service is facing a gap in its vehicle fleet.
“We have a dilemma within the Marine Corps about what are we going to do,” Gen. James Amos, assistant commandant, testified before a joint meeting of the House Armed Services Committee’s readiness, air, land and sea forces and seapower and expeditionary forces subcommittees in December. “Will we continue to recapitalize and reset with more humvees? Or are we going to try to find an interim vehicle with a V-shaped hull that might not be a JLTV yet ... That’s what we’re struggling with right now.”
Companies have produced prototypes to compete for the JLTV program. But Amos said the proposed vehicles do not meet the Corps’ needs in bomb resistance or weight. “They’re 23,000 to 24,000 pounds, which the Marine Corps is not interested in because those are too heavy to go on ships,” he said. “We just can’t do that.”
The humvee will likely remain a “staple for the forces,” he added. But the service also is looking at an alternative, in the form of a redesigned humvee with a capsule V-shaped hull, Amos said.
The Marine Corps in the latter half of 2009 determined that MRAPs, which were rapidly developed and rushed to the war zones, will have a place in its ground tactical vehicle strategy, said Amos. “There was a time when we thought it was too big and too heavy for us and just didn’t fit our expeditionary flavor. We’ve come full circle right now,” he said. “Our anticipation is we’ll have 2,346 of these rascals that are going to become part of our regular inventory.”
The behemoth vehicles, however, are much too large to maneuver in some areas of Afghanistan. That is why the service requested MRAP-all terrain vehicles — smaller, compact MRAPs with independent suspensions that are better suited to maneuver in the off-road environment that marines are encountering there.
Before President Obama last fall ordered the additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan to support his new strategy, the Corps had been pulling out its equipment from Iraq to ship it back to the United States for refurbishment, he told the panel. About 22 percent of the equipment was instead diverted to support the 10,600 marines already in Afghanistan. After the president’s announcement, 30 percent more of the equipment awaiting shipment home from staging areas in Kuwait, Bahrain and Qatar is heading to Afghanistan to support the 9,000 marines expected to deploy there later this year.
The top priority of the Marine Corps commandant is to provide enough equipment to forces on the ground in Afghanistan, Amos said. To fully equip the units, officials also are dipping into resources at home stations and pre-positioned storage facilities to support the effort.
The remaining equipment coming out of Iraq will return home on ships. Vehicles with more than 50 percent of life left will be refurbished, or reset, as the military describes the process.
Resetting equipment will cost $10 billion through the next several years, Amos told the committee members. Of that, $8.2 billion will be within the Defense Department’s five-year “future years defense plan,” budgeting cycle, said Amos.
That number is expected to increase as troops continue to fight overseas. In addition, the Corps needs another $5 billion to buy equipment that it does not have to accommodate the lessons learned from fighting in recent years, Amos said.
The Corps used to allocate 80 handheld radios for a 900-strong infantry battalion. It now distributes 800 to the battalion. The uptick in numbers is a trend that covers the spectrum of equipment, from communications to weapons to vehicles.
“The old table of equipment we started out with in March of 2003 was good then,” said Amos. But the intervening years at war has changed the numbers. The Corps has concluded that it did not buy enough equipment for all 27 infantry battalions. Instead of 56 humvees per battalion, it needed 86 vehicles. “That comes with a cost,” he said. Concerned lawmakers are hearing the message. “We’re not investing enough in procurement and reset for the Marine Corps and our military in general,” said Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Pa., a member of the readiness subcommittee. “It sounds like the budget doesn’t provide adequately for procurement and that’s something that we in Congress need to fight to make sure the funding is there, and fight the administration if they’re not willing to invest more in what we need.”
Amos said that not replacing equipment adequately will eventually compromise the Corps’ readiness. To support the overseas operations, marines are already sacrificing equipment that they need to train at home.
“Without being able to replace vehicles from combat loss, we would find ourselves further in the hole and less capable than we are today,” he said.
But other lawmakers are not so sympathetic. “To simply come in every year with each defense appropriations bill hoping you’re going to be able to get the money for reset in competition with all of the other capital asset acquisitions that you do year by year puts us in the position we’re in now,” said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii.
He proposed to the services that a capital budget or its equivalent be established to include reset so that they don’t become dependent on a supplemental war budget that may or may not arrive in an appropriate time frame to meet their needs.