Lawmakers chide Marines for expeditionary vehicle woes

Despite recent efforts to get the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle on track, House lawmakers on Tuesday chided military officials for their failure to rein in costs and correct reliability problems that have plagued the Marine Corps program.

House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee Chairman Gene Taylor, D-Miss., told a panel of Pentagon and Marine Corps officials that the Pentagon's decision to make major changes in the program "tempered" his concerns somewhat.

But Taylor questioned the Defense Department's decision to continue its contract with prime contractor General Dynamics Corp., which has already received $82 million in award fees for a program that has not performed as promised.

"I am concerned about what kind of message this sends to the public and to those in the defense industry," Taylor said.

Seapower Subcommittee ranking member Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., echoed many of Taylor's comments, adding that the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle's problems are not uncommon to defense programs whose price tags often grow significantly from the design board to the field.

"There is a disturbing familiarity here," Bartlett said. "It almost seems like we could replace the name 'EFV' with the name of other major acquisition programs and we'd be dealing with a lot of the same issues."

The Marine Corps first began work on the EFV in the late 1990s, one of several revolutionary platforms designed to give the Marines improved speed and maneuverability in expeditionary or amphibious operations. The vehicle was designed to race across open waters at more than 25 miles an hour and drive across land at 45 mph.

Earlier this month, Pentagon officials announced that the Marine Corps would change General Dynamics' payments, impose significantly greater government supervision of the program and delay operational availability for four years.

The EFV, which already has consumed $2.3 billion, will cost $17 million a copy -- nearly three times the unit cost estimated years ago. Meanwhile, the prototype vehicles averaged only 4.5 hours between breakdowns during operational tests in 2005 and 2006, substantially below requirements for production vehicles, which must last 43 hours between repairs.

"I want to be very clear what this kind of reliability problem can mean for the Marines who will operate these vehicles," Taylor said. "Going into combat in armored vehicles that float 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."

In its version of the fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill, lawmakers slashed $200 million from the Pentagon's $288 million request for continued EFV development. The Senate Armed Services Committee's version of the measure, which the chamber could begin considering this week, cuts $100 million from the program.

Roger Smith, deputy assistant secretary of the Navy for expeditionary warfare, emphasized at the hearing that fully funding the EFV in fiscal 2008 is "critical" to continuing the program.