Earlier this month, Sydney Freedberg characterized the US Marine Corps’ options for its hoped-for Amphibious Combat Vehicle in terms of three generic directions: go high, go low, or go slow. (See "Marines 2014: Year Of Decision For Amphibious Combat Vehicle," Breaking Defense, 9 January 2014). Sydney’s taxonomy of “generic options” can be mapped to choices regarding three generic variables in developmental acquisition: quality, cost, and time. We’d all like it good, cheap, and fast, but we know that it rarely works that way. In Sydney’s characterization,
Going high means emphasizing quality at the expense of cost.
Going low means emphasizing cost at the expense of quality.
Going slow means emphasizing quality at the expense of time.
The first problem is that, as my friend Fred Beach wrote in a dissertation at the University of Texas a few years ago, time is cost. Stretching out development programs increases staff turnover, which induces organizational forgetting, and introduces opportunities for requirements creep, which sends costs yet higher in pursuit of greater quality. So, going slow can really just be going high, slowly. General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) burned through $2 billion of the USMC’s money going slow the last time.
The second problem is that going high and going slow bear risk of total failure. Not schedule risk, or cost risk, or partial performance (quality) risk—total failure. There is simply no guarantee that any given contractor can actually develop a specified system, regardless of how many engineering hours are thrown at it. The Army might have liked its GCV to have had a cloaking device, but no matter how many Nobel-winning physicists they put on the program (see my column of 17 January), that is not going to happen. Again, GDLS spent twelve years trying to get a water-planing armored vehicle to work reliably, and never could.
This latter issue reminds me of something I heard way back in ROTC: if you don’t have a solution, you don’t have a problem. Actually, it may be more aptly put as if you don’t have a solution, you’re defining the wrong problem.
Sydney argues that the AAV-7s can’t get ashore without unacceptable losses under anti-tank missile fire. (Put aside for the moment the question of how those mostly wire-guided missiles will operate over salt water.) He notes that the point behind the V-22 and the LCAC was to allow the Corps to land on a much wider expanse of coastline worldwide, so that the AAVs and landing boats wouldn’t need to run another gauntlet like Iwo Jima. But, he goes on, that doesn’t apply to the stressing case of a Chinese seizure of the Senkakus. Landing there, the Marines have no choice but to yell "Leroy Jenkins" and plunge into the water, rather like they were headed over the top in 1916.
I use the First World War analogy because the 1916 differed from 1918. In his book Battle Tactics of the Western Front, Paddy Griffiths did a fine job of showing how the British Army had partially overcome the problem of no-man’s land, even before the tanks showed up. But as with the more widely-known story of the German Sturmtruppen, the British did not resolve the issue wholly, or even primarily, with new materiel. Restoring fluidity to the battlefields of the First World War was primarily a result of tactical innovation and modest technological developments.
As I wrote last year in my original essay “Rethinking the Problem of the Next Amphibious Assault Vehicle,” amphibious assault is a complicated problem. Before they ever make contact with the enemy, assault troops need to undertake a sequence of transportation tasks: (1) cross the ocean, (2) cross the littoral, (3) cross the surf, (4) possibly climb the reef—the point of the amtrack in the first place, (5) cross the beach, and finally (6) drive overland. Their conveyances on the way may include (a) ocean-going assault ships, (b) rotorcraft, (c) hovercraft, (d) displacement landing craft, and (e) amphibious tractors. And if they are using large ships (a) to get there, they should try to keep the fleet (i) out of easy artillery range, (ii) past the surface-based radar horizon, (iii) back far enough for the missile defenses to have time to respond, and (iv) just plain out of anti-ship missile range. Movements (1) through (5), conveyances (a) through (e) and defensive tasks (i) through (iv) permutate to a lot of plausible interactions of equipment and tactics.
The concept of the AAV-7 chose took conveyance (e) off conveyance (a), to undertake transportation tasks (3) through (6), and simply from defensive position (1). The concept of the EFV also took (e) off (a), to cross (3) through (6), but from defensive position (ii) or (iii). The concept for the ACV, at least as the Corps seems to intend, isn’t really that different so far. If the AAV-7 is totally inadequate, but the EFV was totally infeasible, what confidence should we have that a middling tactical approach will work?
To borrow another’s recent paraphrasing of Justice Potter Stewart, I cannot define tactical innovation, but that is not it. Before plunging into another expensive program, I hope that the Corps gives very serious thought to how best to accomplish that mission. The March 2013 issue of Marine Corps Gazette hosted some of that debate, but we need a great deal more.
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