After 10 years and $1.7 billion, this is what the Marines Corps got for its investment in a new amphibious vehicle: A craft that breaks down about an average of once every 4 1/2 hours, leaks and sometimes veers off course.
And for that, the contractor, General Dynamics of Falls Church, received $80 million in bonuses.
The amphibious vehicle, which can be launched from a ship and then driven on land, is so unreliable that the Pentagon is ditching plans to begin building the first of more than 1,000 and wants to start over with seven new prototypes, which will take nearly two years to deliver, at a cost of $22 million each.
The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's largest weapons programs and exemplifies the agency's struggle to afford a cadre of new mega-systems that are larger and more complex, but also more trouble, than their predecessors...
When it was launched in 1996, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle was promoted as an example of acquisition reform as hundreds of General Dynamics and Marine Corps officials moved into the same 62,000-square-foot office building in Woodbridge to run the program, in hopes of saving time and money. The program's efforts to keep maintenance costs low won plaudits from Defense leaders and twice earned the program the Pentagon's highest acquisition award, in 1997 and 1999. In 2001, the program collected an innovation award for developing a system to keep the craft's internal components from overheating, a technology that has been adopted for other weapons...
General Dynamics defends its progress, noting that the vehicle has met many goals, including being able to reach speeds of 30 knots on the water. The vehicle is fast enough to keep up with the Abrams tank on land, it can carry 17 Marines, and its systems can communicate with other ships and tanks, all key performance criteria, the company says...
... the Marine Corps is ready to start over. The service is to present a plan to salvage the program to Defense leaders in March. In addition to buying seven new prototypes, the Marine Corps proposal will probably require at least a two- or three-year delay, adding $200 million in development costs a year, said Bryant, the Marines program manager.
The service will seek to simplify the design, "getting rid of the complexity where we don't need complexity," he said...
