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Thursday, August 20, 2009
As QDR results gel, EFV termination looms
It’s generally held in defense industry circles that the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) –
now essentially complete, according to Colin Clark – is intended to provide the intellectual underpinning to justify the major program kills that
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced on 6 April. What is unknown is how much further the QDR findings might go. As these pages reported
at the time, conspicuous in its absence from Dr. Gates’ 6 April list was the Marine Corps’ Expeditionary Fighting
Vehicle (EFV). Perhaps because EFV is the Corps’ number one acquisition priority, perhaps because the Secretary
didn’t want the fight at the time, the issue of what to do with this long-suffering program was, somewhat surprisingly,
deferred.
Now comes indication, from no less than the Vice Chief of Staff (USMC) General James Cartwright,
that the EFV’s end is nigh. As Aviation Week & Space Technology’s Bill Sweetman notes, Gen Cartwright very likely let word out of the bag yesterday when he branded the EFV with the scarlet
“E” for “exquisite,” which Mr. Sweetman notes is a pejorative term coined by Defense Secretary Robert
Gates to refer to programs aimed at producing be-all, end-all systems that are unrealizable in today's austere budgetary environment.
So, now we know, with ever more certainty, what we really knew before: that EFV will be terminated and that Marine
infantry units will get ashore for distributed operations using MV-22's and they will maneuver using the Osprey and with whatever
can be slung under a CH-53 or brought to the beach via an LCAC.
The questions that remain are how much resistance
the Congress will present and what other major programs, if any, will be added to the list of terminations proposed when the
QDR rolls out. Here's guessing that Gen Cartwright and others will ensure that there will be no real surprises.
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