The history of the LVTP7/AAV7 may be summarized as follows:Why is this quick and dirty rundown of the AAV important? Simple! It shows the date of service entry for the AAV, highlights the various name changes that have been used to paper over the replacement issue and perfectly illustrates the danger that future Marines are being placed in by having a vehicle that has a projected service life of....58 years!
- 1972 - 1975 LVT7 Fielded. Most common variant was the LVTP7.
- 1983 - 1986 LVT7A1 Service Life Extension Program (SLEP)
- 1987 Redesignated AAV7A1 to better reflect mission
- 1987 - 1999 Product Improvement Program (PIP) - Upgrade Lethality, Survivability and Communications
- 1999 – 2003 AAV7A1 Vehicle Reliability, Availability and Maintainability/Rebuild to Standard Program (RAM/RS)
Yeah you read that right. The United States Marine Corps is planning on keeping the Amphibious Assault Vehicle in service for 58 years.
Consider. This is the same as asking a Marine Tanker to drive a Sherman into combat during the 1st Gulf War!
The F-35 has destroyed the Marine Corps' budget and appears to be well on its way to destroying the institution itself. This is no longer bothersome.
The USMC has an armored vehicle crisis.
SIDENOTE: This may all become irrelevant. I can't imagine the vehicles even being road worthy much less combat ready for much longer. Even if the replacement ACV is delivered on time there will be at least a 5 year gap (by my estimation) of the Marine Corps NOT having armored protection for its infantry forces...at least 5 years and probably longer.
This is what most people don't get about what's wrong with the F-35 program. It's eating all the money, and thus other needed programs are not happening.
ReplyDeleteIn Canada we have 50 yr old Sea King helicopters flying off the decks of our frigates. The replacement Sikorsky's are supposedly coming but they are years late, a fiasco which originally started with the cancellation of the EH-101 replacements. Different gong show, but still a demonstration of incompetence in the way procurement is being run.
spot on and its not only affecting Canada but everyone else too.
Deletewhat's worse? the fact that all this money is being poured into an airplane that will not deliver whats promised. not only will we not get much needed equipment because of this airplane, but at the same time the sacrifices that are being made to get it just aren't worth the lives that will be lost because of the corruption in Lockheed Martin and there supporters on the internet but especially in the Pentagon because you have some four stars that lack the courage to admit that they were wrong.
I thought it was going to get canceled anyway? why so worried?
ReplyDeleteThe F-16 is only 6 years younger (Fielded dates 72 vs 78).
ReplyDeleteWhich vehicle has seen more combat?
Which vehicle is a greater force multiplier?
Which vehicle's replacement program is more important?
and if the small wars theorist are correct which vehicle will be used more? which vehicle will cost more lives if it malfunctions. sorry but the life of one fly boy is not worth 17 Marines in an AAV.
DeleteSpudmanWP has a THEORETICAL point.
DeleteAge is not the defining factor, effectiveness is. This is where the comparison fails.
F16's have seen much more improvement and are still competitive with most opposition.
AAV is not. There are no 'block 60' AAV's being produced that have almost nothing in common with the original. Operational needs exceed capabilities and potential opponents have better gear
I have 'daydreamed' a little about how one could make an effective amphibious armored vehicle , fast and relatively cheaply and quickly ran in to the limits of my knowledge. Maybe some of you can fill in some gaps. One of the thing I thought of was the Russian PTS series, which seems to use components, running gear of MBT's. Would it be possible to follow the same route? M1 might be to heavy, but Leo1 , AMX30 or Puma apc might work. The PTS can carry quite a lot of troops, weight. Trade some of that in and add a well armored hull and a remote controlled turret. It wont be as fast as the original plan or the Chinese option,,but have good armor and armor is what I think you need.
I know you can in principle make anything float, it is a matter of weight vs volume. If the volume is large enough even a concrete tub floats. By making the new vehicle quite large you add room for armor.
Looking forwards to your insight!
PS. one thing that would certainly help is to declare replacing AAV an emergency priority and bypass a lot of the red tape. Instead of all this corporate bal bla and the attempts to make it do everything just make it work and make it work fast.
DeleteSpudmanWP,
DeleteIt's never about what the aircraft or the AFV has done or can do in a vacuum. There is no gratitude or emphasis of importance involved here, it's a cold dead hunk of metal and plastic.
The only thing that counts is what the system can do vs. the enemy/environment it hasn't faced yet, in the years that are yet to come, vs. the threats that haven't been built but are known to be presently likely to be introduced to service.
So, ask yourself. If we aren't quite done with Southwest Asia yet and the Islamic threats we face inspire our past Allies to politely decline to let us base-in, will an F-16, even with CFT and 600 gallon tanks be enough? If the same scenario applies to the Pacific Rim with the 'Near Peer' lurking there, do we believe that an F-35 will do any better, simply because it carries the equivalent of the F-16E's fuel, internally? If it takes hours and hours to get too and from a given location because you are _not_ traveling at even full military thrust as 450-500 knots, what will your pilot be good for when he arrives at the sharp end of the mission radius with all of...20 minutes on station? 40?
What good the Marine who, having been smartly delivered over the water to the beach in his 50 knot Stiletto, 200 knot Osprey or 10 knot ACV, discovers that his aircover is fleeting as much as technically ill conceived to deal with a J-16 or J-20? Whether his cover comes in an F-16 or an F-35 doesn't matter if the Carrier that launches that aircraft is no nearer to his position on an embattled beach than the one which left Guam 2 hours ago and won't arrive for another 3.
He'll be ashes and teeth ten times over by then.
Now consider what happens when Solid State Lasers, Microwave equvialents to ADS and Hunting Weapons like MALI start to show up and there is literally no place for manned overhead airpower that is manned because you are losing jets 1 jet from every 5 that arrive on station.
It's the emphasis that is missing. The willingness to say: "What if it's neither or if the one can stay but it has to have a degree of protection that the other cannot provide? A kind of protection that can afford to be lost in the low tens even if it means refilling the airwing by flying jets out of CONUS?"
Or... "What if, mission reports say I need only ten shots per day worth of hard-kinetics CAS but there is absolutely no way of saying when the lightning is going to have to be called down and thus _onstation time_ matters more than other metrics of performance?"
Or... "What if the sad truth is that the battlespace overhead a ground force is simply too predictable a locus, drawing all manner of attention because _they are not stealthy_. And yet... And yet if you stand off as little as 30km with a PASSM or 15km with a 200KW laser, the metric changes, if you can fly high enough. to be outside the immediate search zone of threat fighters, drones and directed energy weapons systems?"
I can all but guarantee that the Gen-6 'fighter' which we need is not going to happen if it's a manned platform because there is not enough evolutionary wiggle room left to make competent trades without pulling at good...5-10,000lbs out of the empty equipped weight. BUT if you /do do that/ I can equally guarantee that some wonderful things will open up. True VTOL with a Thrust to Weight Ratio _at takeoff_ approaching 1.5:1. Supercruise with such low drag that you can click the odometer off at 60-70% RPM and not even need burner to bust the Mach. Zero-tank loiter times on the order of 3hrs on first arrival and 10 hours for each of as many times as you care to tap the tanker thereafter.
DeleteIf we combine platform performance with weapons system performance so that we buy both with deliberate intent rather than 'as we can afford to' integrate a solid state laser and a CUDA type (Mach 2-3, gel powered, 100kg, 40-50km) we can start to consider what it is that those Marines on the ground are doing.
Are they there to deliver their own effects? To target for others? To occupy and hold terrain? To protect or to destroy?
Sizing the Marine Expeditionary Unit's First Team Over The Beach is about knowing what you want to do with them in a given unit configuration as much as delivery method. And supporting that capability with operational trades between what they HAVE TO be able to do on their own, for force protection and what they -can do- if Airpower is on station, doing it's job.
In turn, this lets you start to think: "Well, what is airpower's job?" Protect the ground force? That's too simple and too melodramatic. Protect the mission? Okay. Now we're talking. Is the objective of the mission to bring the enemy to battle so that he can no longer hold his own terrain matrix and thus leaves you to advance into it? Ahhhh, but if that's the case, why wait for the threat to get close to the Marine unit? Why not use the Marine force which, again, by size and noise of entry is _not stealthy_, to act as a fixing agent to /support the concentration of enemy forces/ so that airpower can kill them all at once or in sufficient density as to rout the rest.
When that Marine recon element called in the B-52 which dropped the Wicmid whose Skeets flowered all over that T-72 column of the Baghdad division, 'headed south', the truth is that only about the first 15-20 vehicles got serviced. But among them was the unit commander's tank and that did for the whole unit.
DeleteOkay. So we flip roles and the ground force now fixes and/or attracts the enemy for destruction by air instead of the other way around with ground being the (slow as molasses) maneuver element which air supports and secures for. How many sorties does that come down to, exactly? And _worst case_ (the enemy adopts the Khafji model with multiple independent mobile group maneuver teams, each of which is far enough from the other to be a separate engagement), what does that mean for unit composition and kill counts per vehicle in mopping up the leakers as their own force protection?
See, this is how you start to really do _mission_ trades, not by talking about platforms off the bat but by talking about capabilities you need to hold onto, gaps you need to fill and where technology is taking you that you might have to rethink applications for specific weapons systems.
And we aren't doing it. Blinkers on, bit in teeth, each service struggles to retain the maximum force size and budget percentage, past which, they will 'mix and match with whatever is there'.
That's going to get us beaten. And the way it will happen is EXACTLY the way we advertise it: "No U.S. Soldier has worried about threat air since the 1950s..." Shoot off or (radius+station time) invalidate the top cover, whether it's A2A or A2G oriented and _it doesn't matter_ what the subsequent threat looks like from the skies. Because the enemy on the ground is likely going to have the numbers and capabilities to nail our hides to a wall.
China certainly. Russia too. Iran and DPRK, perhaps, if the situation is right. You just cannot make an offensive posture assumption of 'what Marines do' (take the war to the enemy where they live) and not account for the changing nature of technology leveraging and force ratios in a fading U.S. force metric where we cannot sustain at Cold War levels.
The F-35 has destroyed the Marine Corps' budget
ReplyDeleteLOL any proof showing what part of the Marine Corps' budget paid for even a single F-35?
Be fair Sol. In 1987, the F-35 was not even an idea yet, so how could it affect plans then?
ReplyDeleteDon't worry, Sol, the AAV7 still won't beat the longest serving weapons system the B-52.
ReplyDeleteI think the M1911A1 has you beat :)
DeleteSpud wins. :)
DeleteSpud hardly wins. there are no 1911's in service from 1945. there aren't even 1911's that date back to 1990. Spud wins nothing.
DeleteThink the new designation for it is the M45.
Deletethey're all new builds. not rebuilt models like the AAV or B-52. so no. its still different.
DeleteAh, so you mean the years in service for the specific item, not the type.
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteYou want original.. I would be willing to bet there are original Colt 1911 models in service somewhere.
DeleteBesides, I found the winner:
USS Constitution :)
ROFL! Old Ironside?
DeleteM113 ?
DeleteBesides, i starting to think that the f35 is the mightest aircraft of the world... It has almost destroy Otan air power without being fielded yet. Which other aircraft can claim That ?
58 Years? Thats entering into T-54/55 territory.
ReplyDeleteAny older and Clint Eastwoods M1 Garand from Gran Torino shall be the next comparison point.
ReplyDeleteAnd if you want comparison with other amphibious fighting vehicles, India only retired its PT-76 tanks in 2009. Different country, different priorities etc. but you get the point.
ReplyDeletePatria has won tenders before just because the company has been able to deliver the first batch quickly from its own reserves.
ReplyDeleteXA-360 is not exactly a Havoc and has too heavy armor to be amphibious but its part of the same vehicle family and you would already have trained crews by the time you get the amphibious ones.
Just saying if you have to look for a plan B.
I really find this disturbing. Most of the MPC contestants are in service and in production for other countries, which means that the production lines are "hot", so why is a replacement taking such a long time? It's probably the paperwork and the testing that is taking so long, which might be an indicator of too much red tape.
ReplyDeleteGentlemen, this is patently untrue. First of all the AAV has been refurbished numerous times, when a vehicle goes through a depot rebuild, it comes out as a brand, spanking new vehicle; everything is repaired and most replaced on the unit. Coupled with the modifications of the iteration, i.e. applique armor, upgraded armaments, driveline, etc. To say the Marine Corps is using 58 year old vehicles is just not true. As a couple have stated, it would be like saying the various weapons that have been in existence for decades and even a century are obviously not the same ones. They are not only new manufactured versions of the same system. Well, the AAV is just that, its new each time it gets a rebuild as they go through the depot process. Essentially the only thing remaining original is the base hull, and that is scrutinized for integrity before the rebuild. The reason countries like India and others replace their vehicles is because they lack the industrial base to do a tactical vehicle refurb. Additionally, technology hasn't made any great leaps in the amphibious vehicle world. Trust me on this one. I work on the ACV program and can tell you the ACV is by no means a one-for-one replacement for the AAV, and the EFV wasn't either. Want to talk about antiquation, the USMC powers-that-be need to eliminate the ship to shore philosophy, as those days are long over.
ReplyDeleteWell, as I posted in a previous thread, I see nothing wrong with a Fast Landing Craft or an LST unloading on the beach.
DeleteThere are also a few improvements that the AAV can use, for example, buoyant armour, a change in the frame from aluminum to steel to withstand warping from the weight of applique, maybe a more powerful engine in anticipation of added weight increase from add on kits etc.
I mentioned before that I keep an interested eye on Singapore since I was assigned to work here and they had a few interesting variants on what we normally have, one of which is what they call an FCU, Fast Craft Utility. Basically, instead of the long endurance that LCUs normally have, they traded the deployment time for speed. Only a 24 hour endurance, which makes them tied to LPD/LHAs, but 20 knots +/-. They basically treat it as an "aircraft", refueling while reloading. It's an interesting twist. Can't see the USMC going for it though, the LCU's self deployability actually allows more landing craft in an area than can be carried aboard an LHA, but the tradeoff seems to be a nail biting last mile. And yes, unlike the LCU, FCUs are meant for assault, hence the high sprint speed.
I don't see anything wrong with an FCU/Stryker combination for a fast beach assault.
A bit more background on the FCU
Deletehttp://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WFPUfZ0-gi8/Um06EriEX-I/AAAAAAAAPzk/AHXSU8XXqJ0/s1600/Thai+Navy23.jpg
Ignoring the quality of the main site, this pic is an FCU carrying a Thai BTR-3
I can't find the one where they deployed an M-113, but with this, it does show that an FCU/Stryker combination is possible.
@Gargoyle 6.
DeleteFirst I would like to know. Did you work on the ACV project or the MPC project that turned into the ACV? Additionally while you say that there hasn't been any advancement in the state of the art when it comes to amphibious vehicles my response has been its simple. Because no one has funded it! The USMC was all in on the EFV and other manufacturers simply walked on to other projects. The ACV as we know it today has such modest requirements that it seriously makes me wonder if simply doing an upgrade to the AAV wouldn't make more financial sense.
So in my opinion the reason why we have amphibious vehicles that perform to the same standard as the WW2 model is simply because money hasn't been invested in improvements.
Next you talk about dropping the ship to shore requirement? I say no. There are only three forms of forcible entry and against a peer threat the only one that is remotely feasible is the amphibious assault.
More to come. I assure you this will be a blog post that will dig into your entire statement. But I thank you for the spark. This needs to get out there and discussed in the open.