Four Cubic Feet of Training Capability

The Marine Corps’ ACV fleet has suffered four vehicle rollovers in the surf zone within a period of 18 months resulting in three vehicles being damaged beyond economic repair which equates to a loss of ~$20 million dollars in government property.?Thankfully, no Marines were killed or seriously injured in these incidents.?The ACV is in full-rate production and the basic design of the vehicle hull and propulsion system cannot be modified to significantly change the characteristics of the vehicle dynamics.?The Marine Corps is stuck with the design for at least a decade of not for the entirety of the planned 30-year service life.?That’s very unfortunate for the Marines that will crew this vehicle, not to mention the security of the nation that depends upon the Marine Corps’ capability as an amphibious force in readiness.

The surf zone instability issues of the ACV are not entirely a surprise.?It is a combat system that straddles three distinct domains of mobility which are deep water, surf zone, and land mobility.?Design tradeoffs in performance and stability between those three mobility domains are just a fact of life.?The ACV has 80% of its mission profile on land and the remainder is probably 15% in deep water and 5% in the surf zone.?In ship to shore movement for amphibious vehicles, the last mile is the most challenging because of the surf conditions, the transition from water jet propulsion to wheeled propulsion, and of course not to be overlooked is the fact that the landing may not be in a “permissive environment” but rather a “forced entry” operation.??Since the basic design of the ACV is frozen, the only lever left to adjust is operator/driver training.

The ACV is the most expensive ground combat vehicle program in the history of the Marine Corps and has been a top acquisition priority since the program was initiated a decade ago.?It should be both surprising and troubling that the ACV “acquisition program baseline” did not include the development and procurement of a operator/driver simulator.?If the ACV were an aircraft acquisition program, this omission of a training simulator would be unthinkable.?However, because amphibious vehicles do not cost nearly as much as combat aircraft and they rarely (though sometimes do) sink, ground vehicle acquisition programs are given “a pass” on the need for operator/ driver simulator.

?The omission of operator/driver simulators as a mandated component of ground and amphibious vehicle acquisition programs has had quantifiable costs in damaged and destroyed vehicles and in injuries and deaths of Marines.?Military vehicle mishaps account for more non-combat deaths on duty than any other cause.?A report from the Government Accountability Office, GAO-21-361[1], published in 2021 found that ground vehicle rollovers accounted for 24% of all motor vehicle accidents and 63% of accidents resulting in a death.?The GAO also found that driver error was a contributing cause in 83% of all tactical vehicle accidents.?This would lead one to believe that the Marine Corps would put a strong emphasis on developing and resourcing adequate training for drivers of the ACV but until this week, over two years since the ACV went into full rate production, the Marine Corps had not published any solicitation to industry for ACV driver training.

On March 27, the Marine Corps Program Manager for Advanced Assault Amphibious (PM AAA) vehicles published a request for white papers (RWP) through the Consortium Management Group C5 for a deployable driver trainer for the Amphibious Combat Vehicle.?The problem statement (capability gap) in the RWP states that, “This system must simulate driver tasks from the vehicle and well decks of a landing class ship through the surf zone and inland over operational mission profile terrain to the objective.”??That seems like an appropriate scope for an operator/driver simulator.?In the following section of the RWP it states that, “The ACV Driver Training System must incorporate advanced technological solutions.”??So far, so good.?However, in the next section of the RWP it states that, “For planning purposes, anticipate that the deployable solution should fit within a Pelican 1620 case or similar.”?A Pelican 1620 case is a hard shell rolling transport case with a volume of four cubic feet.?That is approximately the same size as a foot locker.

Pause for a moment to consider that the Marine Corps states a portable form factor for the solution that categorically eliminates from consideration all high-fidelity simulator of the sort that employ a six degree of freedom motion platform a.k.a. “6-DoF” simulators.?The planning constraint that the proposed solution should fit inside a four cubic foot container means that without explicitly saying so that the Marine Corps has decided that their solution will be based on a head mounted virtual reality (VR) display.?There is no mention in the RWP of the required “fidelity to task” of the simulator measured in terms of visual, haptic, or vestibular stimuli.?There is no discussion of requirements for field of view for the trainee.?There is no mention of verification and validation of the models that are implemented in the solution or measurement by standards of instructional systems design.?All of these aspects are left to the imagination of the offeror and the subjective interpretation of the source selection committee.

The Marine Corps is confident that the solution to the training deficiencies that may have contributed to the rollover of four ACVs in the surf and the loss of ~$20 million of government property will fit inside a four cubic foot box.?After a decade of development, testing, and fielding of the ACV the program office finally addresses the need for a simulator and the most tangible attribute that they can provide for the solution is that it fits inside a portable transport case.?That is both amazing and disappointing.

After the destruction of three ACVs on training missions that were well within the performance parameters specified for the vehicle, is it utterly out of the question for the Marine Corps to invest in the procurement of a dozen full motion simulators to train the Marines that drive ACV using a comparable level of fidelity to what is provided for every single aircraft in the US military?

[1] https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-21-361.pdf