USMC's Billion Dollar Blunder

This is simply pathetic. More evidence that DOD is willing to go to great lengths to flush money into a weapon with no operational value or effectiveness. We can thank the China haters for this one. Last time I checked, our asymmetric enemies didn’t put up much of a beachhead defense and Iran is approachable, God-forbid, from the East and West. Now who does that leave...?

We can't afford to throw away this kind of money on a weapon system with absolutely ZERO utility. The Corps should be ashamed.

Problems Stall Pentagon's New Fighting Vehicle
Costly Amphibious System Not Meeting Expectations

Renae Merle
The Washington Post

After 10 years and $1.7 billion, this is what the Marines Corps got for its investment in a new amphibious vehicle: A craft that breaks down about an average of once every 4 1/2 hours, leaks and sometimes veers off course.

And for that, the contractor, General Dynamics of Falls Church, received $80 million in bonuses.

The amphibious vehicle, which can be launched from a ship and then driven on land, is so unreliable that the Pentagon is ditching plans to begin building the first of more than 1,000 and wants to start over with seven new prototypes, which will take nearly two years to deliver, at a cost of $22 million each.

The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle is one of the Pentagon's largest weapons programs and exemplifies the agency's struggle to afford a cadre of new mega-systems that are larger and more complex, but also more trouble, than their predecessors.

Despite reforms meant to rein in costs, it is not unusual for weapons programs to go 20 to 50 percent over budget, the Government Accountability Office recently found. Among the offenders is the Army's sprawling modernization program, which aims to update everything from tanks to drones and is now expected to cost $160 billion, up from $90 billion, and a Lockheed Martin missile-warning satellite program, which is projected to cost more than $10 billion, up from $4 billion.

The Marines' troubled program is on a collision course with critics who are wary of its growing price tag and who wonder about the utility of an amphibious vehicle meant to storm beaches in a way the military hasn't done for decades, at a time when soldiers are consumed with urban warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Full article.