The U.S. Marine Corps Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle – Image via Wikipedia

The Marine Corps’ next-generation amphibious assault vehicle is in trouble. Deep trouble. Sometime in early October, Defense Secretary Robert Gates will meet with the commandant of the Marine Corps and the Navy secretary to decide whether the program should go forward. The good news for the program is that it has surmounted earlier reliability problems and now looks to be by far the best amphibious warfighting vehicle ever built. The bad news is that Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus thinks it costs too much, so he wants to kill it (Mabus is the commandant’s boss). Mabus plans to let the outgoing commandant make his case to Gates for keeping the program on track, and then recommend a different course of action to Gates in a separate meeting.

The vehicle in question is called the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and it is quite impressive — three times the water speed of the vehicle it will replace, and twice the armor. It’s supposed to plane through the water from warships over the horizon, and then once it hits the beach quickly transition to land operations at speeds high enough to keep up with an Abrams tank. The Marine Corps says it will greatly improve the survivability of both Marines going ashore and sailors on the ships from which it is launched. But it isn’t cheap, costing over $10 million per vehicle.

It’s the pricetag that the Navy secretary doesn’t like. He agrees that the Marine Corps needs to have a “forcible entry” capability for invading hostile countries from the sea, and he acknowledges that forcible entry capability must include something like EFV. He just isn’t sure EFV is an affordable solution. Hence the meetings with Gates, and the possibility the program might not go forward — at least in its present form. These kinds of meetings are likely to become increasingly common in the years ahead as the federal government seeks to pare a budget deficit currently running at the rate of about a billion dollars every six hours.

That brings me to the politics surrounding the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, which present something of a case study in how senior policymakers must approach proposals to kill or cut back big weapons programs. For Secretary Mabus the personal stakes are high, because there is a real possibility he might be tapped as the successor to Secretary Gates in the Pentagon’s top job. He’s unusually skilled and charismatic, and the White House owes the former Mississippi governor a lot for signing on early with the Obama campaign. But nobody ever wins friends by killing weapons programs. Admirers maybe, but not the kind of admirers who will vote on the basis of the weapons decision. All the votes, and all the jobs, are on the side of keeping the program going.

In the case of EFV, the jobs situation is especially touchy. The program would produce over 5,000 direct jobs in Ohio and another 5,000 in Michigan, states which can swing either way in national elections. President Obama isn’t going to see a second term unless he carries both states, so Mabus has to consider the electoral fallout from killing EFV — at least, if he aspires to a bigger job in the Obama administration.

And then there’s the other political downside, which is saying “no” to the Marine Corps on a program that it currently rates as its top ground-systems modernization priority. The Marines have been through hell since 9-11, over-stretched and under-equipped during most of the time they were fighting in places like Fallujah. Many voters feel grateful if not downright guilty about what the Marines have been through, so it isn’t good politics to tell them they can’t have their first new amphibious vessel since the Nixon administration. Even if voters don’t grasp the implications of killing the program Congress will, and the Marines are well known for their ability to work Capitol Hill.

You’d think this controversy would be mostly about what is needed to protect young Marines fighting the nation’s wars, but because EFV isn’t currently in the force and won’t be fielded for another several years, the behind-the-scenes intrigues are mainly about politics and money. Killing the program saves money but loses votes. Keeping it intact does the opposite. In some quarters Secretary Mabus will be viewed as a man of courage and principle for moving to end the pricey program. But not in Michigan and Ohio, or in the states hosting major Marine Corps installations. In the latter locations, he will be regarded as a job-killer, or a politician putting Marines at risk. As he approaches the climactic meeting with Secretary Gates, Mabus is getting a quick education on why most politicians aren’t willing to take the heat for killing big weapons programs.