Marines at Camp Pendleton have been retraining in the use of the new Amphibious Combat Vehicle, a troop carrier that’s expected to be the service’s most valuable asset in the amphibious fight and critical to the nation’s crisis response. The program has been revamped in response to a deadly accident.
In the last few months, Marines at Camp Pendleton have been retraining in the use of the new Amphibious Combat Vehicle, a troop carrier that’s expected to be the service’s most valuable asset in the amphibious fight and critical to the nation’s crisis response.
Marines are now learning in the classroom, ensuring they have sound fundamentals of the vehicles, officials said. Building on that, they move to “highly controlled practical evaluations” in the motor pool before transitioning into ground-based training. The new training program ends with the water and in the surf zone.
The vehicle developed by BAE Systems – the same manufacturer of the legacy AAV – was moved from initial testing into the fleet after a training accident on July 30, 2020, in which nine men, including three from Southern California, died when an AAV they rode in sank to the ocean floor off San Clemente Island. It was the worst of the Marines’ amphibious accidents in the service’s history.
The vehicles were quickly pulled from water training for a while in 2021 and then later restricted to only training in the base’s protected Del Mar harbor. The vehicles also missed their debut deployment with the 13th Marine Expeditionary Unit, which recently returned from seven months in the Indo-Pacific.
Externally, the older AAVs are flat-bottomed and run on tracks, like a tank, while the new ACV has a V-shaped hull and eight wheels. The two vehicles’ steering and propeller systems are completely different; at 36 tons, the ACV is also about 10 tons heavier. Because of the differences in their design, it has been reported that the vehicles behave differently in the surf zone.
“We took an A-to-Z scrub of all technical manuals and all previous mishaps with the ACVs and the AAV,” Hall said, adding that the information gleaned was used to find “trends and blindspots.”“In 29 years, I’ve never seen a small handful of mostly sergeants define an entire for an entire community,” he said, calling the newly certified Marines “the first black belt instructors.
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