Costing the Marines’ EFV

Checking into it(click to view full) On August 22/07, the Pentagon released its Selected Acquisition Reports for the June 2007 reporting period, and the US Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program was listed: “The SAR was submitted to report schedules slips of approximately two years since the December 2006 SAR. In February 2007, the program experienced a critical Nunn-McCurdy unit cost breach due primarily to system reliability challenges and a quantity reduction. The department certified a revised program to Congress in June 2007. Program costs increased $4,069.4 million (+34.2 percent) from $11,902.7 million to $15,972.1 million.” To be sure, the new $3.5 million South Korean XK-21 amphibious IFV hasn’t had these problems; but then, the specifications they were handed were more restrained in key areas like water speed (about 5 kph) and aiming to cross rivers rather than swim in medium ocean sea states. DID went and talked to the EFV Program Office to get some explanations for this latest SAR, and also of the EFV’s overall cost growth history. We also wanted a per-vehicle cost for the EFV, because we’d seen numbers ranging for $16 million to $27 million. What follows is their explanation. DID has removed nothing, but we […]