USA — Marine Corps Tests New Fighting Vehicle

WASHINGTON — The Marine Corps is con­duct­ing reli­a­bil­i­ty tests on its lat­est expe­di­tionary fight­ing vehi­cle pro­to­types, the service’s pro­gram man­ag­er for the effort said yes­ter­day dur­ing a “DoD Live” blog­gers round­table.

“[For] the last cou­ple of years, we’ve been going through a redesign for reli­a­bil­i­ty for the basic sys­tem,” Marine Corps Col. Kei­th Moore said. 

The EFV, as it’s known, is meant to serve as a vehi­cle bridge for Marines, car­ry­ing them from Navy ships through the surf and sand and miles deep into ene­my ter­rain. It will replace the assault amphibi­ous vehi­cle that was pro­cured in 1972 and will be more than 40 years old when the EFV is fielded. 

The new vehi­cle can launch far from shore, beyond the range of most guns and mis­siles, and can skim across the water at high speed, allow­ing Marines to achieve sur­prise, avoid ene­my strengths, and “gen­er­ate nev­er-before-real­ized oper­a­tional tem­po across warfight­ing func­tions,” Moore said. 

The first pro­to­type made its debut at the Nation­al Muse­um of the Marine Corps on May 4, on its way to the Marine Corps Amphibi­ous Vehi­cle Test Branch at Camp Pendle­ton, Calif. Three EFVs are at Camp Pendle­ton, and one is at the Aberdeen Test Cen­ter in Mary­land. The pro­to­types will under­go more than 500 hours of rig­or­ous test­ing to ensure that the vehi­cles are on an expect­ed reli­a­bil­i­ty growth path, Moore explained. 

The vehi­cle at Aberdeen is under­go­ing test­ing for safe­ty, human fac­tors, basic auto­mo­tive func­tions and fire­pow­er, Moore said. Only one of the three vehi­cles at Camp Pendle­ton is cur­rent­ly under­go­ing test­ing, but in the next few weeks all three will under­go water- and land-per­for­mance tests, he added. 

Moore said his team has a set of old­er pro­to­types at Camp Pendle­ton that were out­fit­ted with design changes in the elec­tron­ics and fire­pow­er sys­tems. They’ll par­tic­i­pate in a com­bined devel­op­men­tal envi­ron­men­tal test this sum­mer to see how they func­tion in hot weather. 

“This is the most capa­ble infantry fight­ing vehi­cle that will exist in the U.S. inven­to­ry at the time it will get field­ed,” Moore said. “It is a very robust, sur­viv­able infantry fight­ing vehi­cle that has to meet the Marines’ unique requirements.” 

Look­ing back and find­ing mis­takes in the process was a key part of the pro­to­types’ devel­op­ment, the colonel said. 

“At some point, we did­n’t have a process in place that would have giv­en us ear­ly indi­ca­tors that we were on the wrong track or going awry,” he said. Com­ing up with an order­ly process after review­ing the pre­vi­ous design, man­u­fac­tur­ing process­es and ini­tial com­po­nent and sub­sys­tem test­ing allowed the team to cre­ate a bet­ter set of pro­to­types, he added. 

“We are start­ing to see the fruit now of hav­ing put those good process­es into place,” he said. 

Source:
U.S. Depart­ment of Defense
Office of the Assis­tant Sec­re­tary of Defense (Pub­lic Affairs) 

Team GlobDef

Seit 2001 ist GlobalDefence.net im Internet unterwegs, um mit eigenen Analysen, interessanten Kooperationen und umfassenden Informationen für einen spannenden Überblick der Weltlage zu sorgen. GlobalDefence.net war dabei die erste deutschsprachige Internetseite, die mit dem Schwerpunkt Sicherheitspolitik außerhalb von Hochschulen oder Instituten aufgetreten ist.

Alle Beiträge ansehen von Team GlobDef →