Rebuilding efforts anticipate a lengthy fight.

QUANTICO, Va. -- The Marine Corps, as it struggles to rebuild, repair or replace its combat-battered equipment, is planning for a conflict that will continue for years to come.

"I'm not sure when this war is going to end," said Barry Dillon, the executive director of the Marine Corps Systems Command, which is responsible for developing the service's ground combat equipment. "Some say 10 years. Some say longer."

Brig. Gen. Raymond C. Fox, director of the Corps' programs division, agreed. "Nobody in this room is going to be alive when this war is over. We're in this for the long haul."

For the United States to prevail, "we're going to need your help," Dillon told defense industry executives who gathered recently here at this Marine base just outside the nation's capital.

Dillon appealed to companies to increase the speed of their development cycles. "We need to put things into service rapidly and support them adequately," he said. "We need to do a better job of getting ahead of the threat."

In particular, he said, the Marines need better technology for detecting and neutralizing improvised explosive devices, and lighter, sturdier armor for troops and vehicles.

"If and when that blast goes off," he asked, "how can we provide better protection for our Marines? It's very frustrating that the industrial base hasn't been able to do a better job at that."

Dillon noted that Marines are paying the highest toll in Iraq. "Their death rate is twice that of the Army; 10 times that of the Navy and 20 times that of the Air Force."

A major concern is designing transport that can protect occupants better and can be repaired more easily. "We've noticed that flat-bottomed vehicles don't do a very good job against IEDs," Dillon said. "They absorb the blast." By contrast, he added, platforms with V-shaped bottoms--such as the Cougar mine-protected vehicle--funnel some of the blast's impact away from the interior.

Often, Dillon noted, the bombs are so powerful that parts of vehicles are destroyed beyond repair. "Maybe we need to think about throw-away parts, rather than try to design them to survive an IED blast," he suggested. "That way, if parts are seriously damaged, we could just dispose of them and get new ones."

Unmanned aerial and ground vehicles need a common control station, he said. "You have an aerial vehicle, and it has a unique ground station designed for it. You do the same thing for ground vehicles. We can do better than that.

"We recommend a single tactical control system that can fly all aerial vehicles and operate all ground vehicles," Dillon said. "That would improve a whole lot of things."

In any case, Fox said, Marines and their contractors are going to have to get innovative in the years ahead because funding is likely to become more scarce. "Department of Defense funding is going to go down," he said.

Fox cited a projection by the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, showing that defense spending runs in peaks and valleys. It peaked at $450 billion a year in 1968, during the Vietnam War, then dropped during the '70s. It increased again under President Reagan, only to drop after the first Gulf War.

According to the projection, the defense budget--which reached $447.6 billion, including wartime supplements, in 2007--is likely to drop to $350 billion by 2012, Fox said.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the Marine Corps' budget also will decrease, he added, noting that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker has argued that his service needs an increased portion of the defense budget because it is carrying a heavier combat load than other branches. "We said the same thing," Fox said. "We're different from the Navy and the Air Force."

One reason the Corps requires additional money, Fox said, is the need to rebuild, repair or replace equipment lost, damaged or worn out in combat, a process known in military jargon as "resetting the force."

One problem is that "everybody keeps changing the definition of what that means," he added. "Everything is getting more expensive, heavier, and we need more of them."

To press ahead with reset, the Corps plans to spend an additional $8.7 billion in coming years, including $5.8 billion in 2007 and $2.9 billion in the future. Of that total, $5.9 billion would go for ground equipment, with $4.9 billion in 2007 and $1 billion afterwards. Another $3.4 billion would go for aircraft and other aviation-related equipment, with $900 million in 2007 and $1.9 billion in the future.

For ground units, 2007 priorities include expeditionary fighting vehicles to begin replacing battered, Vietnam-era amphibious assault carriers, up-armored humvees that are better able to withstand roadside bomb blasts, and lightweight 155 mm howitzers that are easier to transport than older models.

And it's not just new equipment. Ground units also are getting more stuff than they previously had. Why? The Corps now "is executing a number of operational missions that are inherently ground equipment intensive," Marine Commandant Gen. Michael W. Hagee told the House Armed Services Committee.

"Stability and support operations, counter insurgency, civil military operations and foreign military training all require a greater quantity of equipment than our programmed levels for traditional combat operations," he said. In addition, the Al Anbar Province in Western Iraq--where most Marine operations are taking place--is huge, roughly the size of Utah.

"Our forward operating bases are not in close proximity to each other," Hagee said. "The large distances between them require additional vehicles, communications capabilities and crew-served weapons."

As a result, he explained, the Corps is increasing the amounts of equipment--especially up-armored humvees, seven-ton trucks, radios and .50 caliber machine guns--issued to units deploying anywhere in the Central Command area of operations.

Marine aviation units are running flat out too, said Col. Robert A. Fitzgerald, the Corps' head of aviation plans and policy. "At least one third of our aviation is deployed right now," he said. "One third is preparing to deploy. And one third just got back and doesn't have what it needs to go out again."

Within the past year, Fitzgerald said, Marine rotary-wing aircraft flew more than 60,000 combat flight hours, and fixed-wing platforms completed 31,000. They dropped 80 tons of bombs and fired 80 missiles, 3,532 rockets and more than 2 million rounds of smaller ammunition.

At this pace, the Corps is wearing out much of its aviation fleet, some of which dates back to the Vietnam War. For this reason, it is moving as fast as possible to replace its oldest aircraft.

CH-46E Sea Knight and CH-53D Super Stallion helicopters are being retired in favor of the tilt-rotor MV-22 Osprey. In 2006, the Marines stood up two squadrons of Ospreys, which can take off and land like helicopters and fly like a fixed-wing aircraft. They plan on establishing another in early 2007, Fitzgerald said.

Despite a series of flight-test accidents that took more than two dozen lives, Marines are enthusiastic about the Osprey, which can fly twice as fast and five times as far as the helicopters it is replacing, while carrying three times the payload. The heavier payload is important, Fitzgerald said.

"Our Marines have become incredibly heavy," he said. "The average combat-equipped Marine weighs 277 pounds. He's not putting on weight. He's carrying a heavy load, and our aircraft need to be able to handle that."

Over the long haul, the Marine Corps is developing a next-generation heavy-lift conventional helicopter. In April 2006, it awarded a $3 billion contract to Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., of Stratford, Conn., to design and build up to 156 CH-53Ks. They are intended to provide more payload and range in desert and mountainous terrains than the current three-engine CH-53Es, which Sikorsky bills as the largest, most powerful helicopters of their type in the world. The CH-53K is planned to reach initial operating capability in 2015.

In the meantime, the Marines are replacing their three-decade-old UH-1N Huey utility helicopters and two-decade-old AH-1W Super Cobra attack helicopters with a new generation of rebuilt AH-1Z Super Cobras and completely new UH-1Y Hueys.

As part of the H-1 upgrade program, the Corps plans to buy 180 AH-1Zs and 100 UH-1Ys. To reduce the services operating costs, the two helicopters are designed to share 84 percent of the same parts. The manufacturer, Bell Helicopter, of Amarillo, Texas, has estimated a cost savings of more than $3 billion during the 30-year life of the program.

The effort, however, has been plagued by delays. The production scheduled slipped by eight months, from January to September 2006, according to a 2005 selected acquisition report from the Defense Department. The slippage helped drive the program's cost up by $28 million, from $8.004 billion to $8.032 billion.

Nevertheless, in July, Bell won a $137 million contract for low-rate initial production of seven UH-1Y, a full flight simulator and four composite maintenance trainers. In September, the company rolled out the first production helicopters in preparation for flight tests.

The Corps also is concerned about its fixed-wing fleet. It is planning on replacing several aircraft--including the F/A-18D Hornet fighter, AV-8B Harrier II vertical and short-takeoff-and-landing platform, and EA6B Prowler, which specializes in electronic warfare--with the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.

The current fleet is taking a beating in Iraq, Fitzgerald said. The Prowlers are averaging 125 to 150 hours of flight per month, jamming enemy communications on the ground. "They provide cover for all of our Marines and any other coalition forces in their envelope," he said.

The Navy already has begun transitioning from the Prowler to the E/A-18G Growler, a derivative of the F/A-18F Super Hornet. "But it's only buying enough for its carrier decks, not expeditionary squadrons," Fitzgerald said. "That leaves the Marine Corps with its E/A-6Bs."

Traditionally, the Corps has relied upon the Navy to provide some maintenance for Marine Prowlers, he noted. What happens if the Navy stops providing that service?

"I don't have a solution to that right now," Fitzgerald said. "But the EA-6B is a critical part of the battlefield. We can't leave force protection to joint operations. We need to take care of our Marines."

The Corps' F/A-18D Hornets also are getting a workout in the fighting, flying two to four times their normal rates, Fitzgerald said. The Marines are preparing to replace them with the Joint Strike Fighter.

This aircraft, being developed by a team led by Lockheed Martin Corp., of Bethesda, Md., comes in three variants, a standard fighter for the Air Force, a carrier-based aircraft for the Navy and one capable of short takeoffs and vertical landings for the Marines, the United Kingdom and other allies.

The Air Force version was scheduled to take its first test flight in the closing weeks of 2006. Low-rate initial production is set for later this year. The Marine variant is scheduled to arrive at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md., for flight tests in early 2008. The carrier-based model begins testing in 2009.

Fox concedes that the Corps' modernization efforts currently are taking a back seat to immediate war issues. "It's pretty hard to worry about the snake around the corner when you have an alligator on top of you," he said.

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RELATED ARTICLE: Marine Corps' vision for the future requires more training, technology.

BEGINNING THIS MONTH, the Marine Corps will start testing a new war-fighting concept aimed at countering unconventional enemies. The technologies that would support it, however, are lagging, officials said.

The goal is to disperse small units that would maneuver relatively independently, much like special operations teams. The Marine Corps calls this concept "distributed operations," and is seeking to incorporate it into its war-fighting doctrine.

"Distributed operations are going to enhance our capabilities to be able to influence the action on the ground," said Lt. Gen. Jan Huly, Marine Corps deputy commandant of plans, policy and operations. "It's going to be another tool in the toolkit."

Officials envision that distributed operators will be physically separated throughout geographic locations as large as the southern Pacific, but will be tactically unified through networks, both at sea and at shore, said Lt. Gen. James Amos, commanding general of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command.

"We're on the verge of being able to do that with networked operations," he told a National Defense Industrial Association expeditionary warfare conference in Panama City, Fla.

But other speakers at the conference voiced more skepticism.

"By and large, we have our arms around the tactical pieces of distributed operations," said Brig. Gen. Randolph Alles, commanding general of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory. "But the other pieces--the logistics and medical support--I don't think we have our arms around that," he told the conference.

To turn the concept into reality will require substantial investments in communications gear, weapons and training, said Huly.

For example, distributed operations will require five times the number of communications assets presently in the infantry battalion. "Think of the implications of that," he said.

In current operations, communications assets have often been inadequate, said Brig. Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., director of the Marine Corps operations division at the plans, policy and operations directorate.

"We could not push voice, data and imagery across the force at the appropriate levels to the degree necessary," he said. "Our capabilities and the equipment that we have out there in the operating forces are not what they need to be for the current fight."

Under the distributed operations concept, small units, such as squads and platoons, will make decisions independently of upper echelon commanders.

"One of the most significant implications of distributed operations, from my perspective, is we're pushing down functions--we're pushing down command and control, we're pushing down fires, we're pushing down intelligence, logistics, tactical mobility--to a level far below what it had been before," said Dunford. "As we do that, we need to make sure we're addressing the traininq and education of our Marines and sailors. In some cases, we've probably got to have more mature leadership at certain levels."

In October, the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory conducted an experiment in the Philippines involving the 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, to validate the distributed operations concept and training.

Preparing junior Marines to take on leadership roles requires additional training on specialized communications equipment, as well as other technologies and tactics.

"It is the type of training that we want to field in the operating forces," said Alles.

Having forces so widely dispersed also will put a strain on the logistics support system.

"They are talking about the ability to do things that stress the logistics support systems in ways that we're not sure if we can in fact support them," said Rear Adm. William Landay, chief of naval research.

Maritime prepositioning ship squadrons have traditionally provided up to 15,000 Marines with all the cargo and supplies they will need on deployment for 30 days. However the current fights in Iraq and Afghanistan demand more armor and specialized equipment than in the past conflicts. As a result, "we can't fit everything we need to fit aboard those three ships," said Dunford.

Marine expeditionary units that have deployed to Central Command have had their Iraq-bound equipment, weapons and tactical mobility assets shipped separately and stored in Kuwait, said Dunford.

"That's a great solution" he said, "but it doesn't help you if you need to be deployed somewhere else."

To get around those challenges, the Marines are examining how they might be able to link up pieces of the maritime pre-positioning squadrons with forward-deployed naval forces.

Marine planners expect to conduct additional experiments to address those issues.

One concern is that Marines have encountered problems with their reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition and intelligence dissemination, said Dunford.

"We have some challenges right now in identifying the enemy. We have some challenges in finding the enemy. And none of these concepts are going to be realized unless we wrestle with challenges," he said.

"We have to field unmanned air vehicles at every level in the Marine air ground task force," said Dunford, who added that UAVs are not out in the significant numbers that Marines need today.

Implementing the distributed operations concept will cost money, but that shouldn't be a major hurdle, said Huly. "There is not a shortage of money to fight the war effort here. You just have to be smart," he said. The Marine Corps needs to do a better job explaining what it wants to buy and expediting the procurement process, he added.

Marine Corps insiders, meanwhile, have questioned the relevance of the distributed operations concept, especially at a time when the Corps is overstretched in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to one observer, the debate over distributed operations has become an "unnecessary distraction."--GRACE JEAN