Marine: A Guided Tour of a Marine Expeditionary Unit

by Tom Clancy

  There are many versions of the LAV ; they include the following:* LAV-25--This is the baseline version of the LAV, which is equipped with the M242 25mm Bushmaster cannon and a M240G 7.62mm machine gun. An additional light machine gun can be mounted on a pintle mount. The two-man (commander and gunner) turret has 210 ready rounds--150 high-explosive (HE), 60 armor-piercing (AP)--of 25mm ammunition, as well as stowage for 420 more in the rear compartment if troops are not carried. There are 400 and 1,200 rounds of 25mm and 7.62mm ammunition respectively. The weapons are sighted through an optical sight with a light-image intensifier for night operations, though no FLIR system is yet carried. The turret is powered by an electrically pumped hydraulic system, which is fully stabilized so that it can fire on the move. A total of 401 LAV-25s are in service with the Marine Corps.

  * LAV-AT-- The LAV-AT (for Anti-Tank) uses the same chassis as the LAV-25, and is equipped with a two-man "hammerhead" mount for a twin Hughes Tube-launched, Optically sighted, Wire-guided (TOW) missile launcher in place of the 25mm cannon turret. In addition, a M240G pintle-mounted machine gun with four hundred 7.62mm rounds is carried. Thanks to the erectable "hammerhead" design, the LAV-AT can hide behind a hill or rise and still sight and fire its missiles. A pair of missiles are stored as ready rounds in the launcher, with room for fourteen more in the ammo compartment. A total of ninety-five LAV-ATs are in service with the Marines.

  * LAV-AD--The newest version of the LAV is the LAV-AD (for Air Defense). The weapons station is armed with two four-round packs of Stinger SAMs as well as a 25mm GAU-12 three-barreled Gatling gun. Equipped with a FLIR targeting sensor and a digital data link for queuing, it is a significant improvement over the existing Avenger system which is based on an HMMWV. Currently, seventeen are being procured by the Marines, with additional procurement likely.

  * LAV-C2--Every unit needs secure positions where commanders can receive reports and issue orders. Unfortunately, fixed command posts rarely last long in combat, because either they fall too far behind an advancing force, or they are quickly destroyed by enemy artillery or air strikes when their positions are determined by radio-direction-finding equipment. Thus, the armored mobile command post. To give this capability to LAV units, the Marines have purchased a force of fifty command variants. In the LAV-C2, the weapons turrets are deleted, the crew and ammo compartments are made into a single space and equipped with a shelter tent extension for the rear of the vehicle, and there is a battery of radio gear. This includes four VHF sets, a combined UHF/VHF unit, a UHF position-location reporting set, one HF radio, and a single portable VHF set.

  * LAV-L--Armored units need a lot of supplies in order to accomplish their crucial jobs. Since logistics vehicles of LAV units come under the same kinds of fire as the combat vehicles, they need to be armored as well. For this reason, 94 LAV-L logistics versions were purchased. Based upon the LAV-C, the LAV-L is basically an open compartment for carrying supplies; and it is equipped with a 1,100-1b/500-kg manually powered crane for lifting heavy items like pallets and engines.

  * LAV-M--One of the shortcomings of Marine armored units is that they have no organic armored artillery units like the Army's M 109A6 Paladin 155mm self-propelled howitzer. However, the Marines have developed and deployed fifty armored mortar carriers, based on the LAV. Called the LAV-M, it is equipped with an M252 81mm mortar and carries ninety-nine (five ready, ninety-four stowed) 81mm projectiles. Using the same open-compartment chassis as the LAV-L and C variants, it has a hatch over the rear compartment for the mortar to fire through. The LAV-M also carries a baseplate and bipod for operating the M252 dismounted.

  * LAV-R-Nearly every family of armored vehicles breeds a recovery version, which can be used to haul broken or damaged vehicles to the rear for repair, and the LAV is no exception. The Marines have acquired forty-five of this type, designated LAV-R. Each LAV-R is equipped with a 9,000-1b/4,086-kg boom crane, a 30,000-lb/ 13,620-kg winch, a battery of floodlights, an electric welder, a 120/230-volt generator, and a 10-kw hydraulic generator. The crew consists of a driver, commander, and rigger who is cross-trained in welding and other maintenance/repair skills.

  A Marine LAV-C2 (command and control) of BLT2/6 disembarks from an LCAC in Tunisia in 1995.

  OFFICIAL U.S. MARINE CORPS PHOTO

  Other versions are currently in development, including an electronic-warfare (EW) version that has an array of direction-finding, intercept, and jamming equipment packed onboard. Watch for this LAV-EW version to appear before the turn of the century in USMC service. Other countries using versions of the LAV include Australia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.

  In combat, the LAV has acquired a reputation for reliability and effectiveness, in spite of its light armor and lack of a FLIR thermal sight system. During Desert Storm, LAVs acted as the armored cavalry for the units of I MEF, fixing and finding Iraqi units from the Battle of Al Kafji to the final liberation of Kuwait City. Tragically, the bulk of the LAV losses occurred from friendly fire: One LAV-25 was mistakenly destroyed by a TOW missile from an LAV-AT; and an errant AGM-65 Maverick missile from an Air Force A-10A killed another.

  United Defense LVTP-7/AAV-7A1 (Landing Vehicle, Tracked, Personnel)

  There is no more traditional Marine mission than to land on a beach and then storm inland to an objective. Doing this mission right calls for an extremely specialized kind of vehicle--the amphibious tractor. The amphibious tractor is a strange hybrid mixture of landing craft and armored personnel carrier, a seemingly impossible mix if you think about it. The first requirement for an amphibious landing craft is that it be a seaworthy boat. It needs to handle well in rough seas, and to be able to come ashore in plunging ocean surf--up to 10 ft/3 m high--without swamping or getting stuck. On top of that, the armored personnel carrier must have good cross-country mobility, all-around firepower, and protection for the crew, at least from small-arms fire and shell fragments. All of those requirements make for a design problem with daunting contradictions. Consider the following. You need to design a machine that can deliver a platoon of twenty-five Marines from a landing ship some miles offshore to a hostile beach, making at least 8 mph/13.5 kph. Then, the machine has to be able to crawl inland at 40 mph/64 kph. And it has to have both protection and firepower. The resulting design was neither subtle nor pretty. But it was a great improvement over previous Marine amphibious tracked vehicles.

  The Marines call it an "amtrac" (amphibious tractor), and it's the product of an evolution that began way back in the 1930s in Clearwater, Florida. Donald Roebling was an eccentric millionaire, the grandson of Washington Roebling, the visionary engineer who designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge. One of Roebling's pet projects was the "Alligator," an amphibious crawler designed to rescue hurricane survivors or downed aviators in the cypress swamps of the Everglades. Engineers at the nearby Food Machinery Company (FMC, which built orange juice canning equipment) helped him fabricate parts for the contraption in their spare time. In 1938, the Marines sent an officer to request a demonstration, but Roebling wasn't interested. Then came Pearl Harbor. And Roebling changed his mind. Even so, he maintained his quirky integrity: He refused to accept any royalties from the Government for his design patent, and when he discovered that the cost of building the first military prototype, the LVT-1, was $4,000 less than the Navy Department had allocated, he insisted on submitting a refund!

  A pair of AAV-7A1s moves to contact during an exercise.

  UNITED DEFENSE

  By the end of the war FMC (now the managing partners of United Defense) had built over eleven thousand LVT "Water Buffaloes" in dozens of different types and modifications. They first saw action with the Marines at Guadalcanal in 1942 as cargo carriers, but their moment of glory came in the invasion of Tarawa in November 1943. Planners had miscalculated the tides and underestimated the difficulty of crossing the jagged coral reefs that encircled the tiny atoll. But the amtracs waddled ashore while the normal landing craft were stranded and shot to pieces, thus saving the day and the invasion
. The Marines eventually organized a dozen amtrac battalions in the Pacific, and the U.S. Army even formed a few in Europe (these spearheaded the assault crossing of the flooded Rhine in the spring of 1945). Later, in the Korean War, amtracs played a key role in the Inchon landing.

  When Marines were deployed in force to Vietnam in 1964, the standard amtrac was the LVTP-5, a forty-ton steel monster that carried thirty-seven men, with a ramp door at the bow and a gasoline engine in the rear. It was a good landing craft, but impractical for the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia. The fuel tanks were located under the floor, which made the vehicle a death trap if it struck a mine. As a result, Marines generally preferred to ride on top, and contemporary photographs often show LVTP-5s decorated with improvised forts on their roofs made of sandbags and chain-link fence.

  Even before our direct involvement in Vietnam, the shortcomings of the LVTP-5 were well known, and plans were afoot to make good its shortcomings. In 1963, the Marine Corps asked industry to develop a smaller, less costly amtrac with better cross-country performance. FMC's first LVTPX-12 prototype was finished in 1967; and with minor modifications, it entered production in 1971 as the LVTP-7. Production eventually ended in 1983 when an improved version, designated the LVTP-7A1 (also known as the Amphibious Assault Vehicle Seven--AAV-7A1), came into service. A total of 995 of the original vehicles have been rebuilt to the AAV-7A1 standard, joining 403 new production units. LVTP-7s also serve with the naval infantry of Argentina, Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and Venezuela.

  The AAV-7 is a huge box of welded aluminum alloy, slightly pointy at one end, 26 ft/7.9 m long, 10 ft, 9 in./3.3 m wide, and 10 ft, 3 in./3.1 m high at the deck. Its EAAK armored version weighs 46,314 lb/21,052 kg empty. There is a lumpy weapons station/turret to starboard and smaller lumps for the platoon sergeant's and driver's hatches to port. Marines enter or exit through an enormous hydraulic-powered ramp at the stern, or through a small hinged door in the ramp itself. The accommodations inside can only be described as "austere," with a row of seats along each wall and a removable bench in the middle. The 400-hp Cummins diesel engine is mounted in the right front, where the massive engine block provides some measure of protection to the crew compartment behind it. The Marines who ride it like to complain about the ventilation system, which seems to suck the exhaust fumes directly into the crew compartment. Diesel fumes may smell awful, but diesel fuel is much less explosive than gasoline if your vehicle is hit. The same basic engine is used in the Army's M2/3 Bradley armored infantry fighting vehicle (IFV). The tracks on each side run over six road wheels, each with a torsion-bar suspension system. In the water, the vehicle is propelled by twin jet-pumps which draw water from above each track and spew it out at a rate of 14,000 gallons/53,000 liters per minute. Steering deflectors on the jet pumps allow the vehicle to turn completely around in its own length.

  It was originally intended that the powered one-man turret would carry a German-designed 20mm automatic cannon and a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun. But this proved impractical and the production turret carried the classic and reliable M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun, with a simple reticle gunsight. A thousand rounds of belted ammunition are stowed in two-hundred-round cans which can be reloaded internally. The improved turret of the LVTP-7A1 is powered by an electric motor rather than a hydraulic drive, and supplements the M2 machine gun with a stubby 40mm Mk. 19 automatic grenade launcher with ninety-six belted rounds as the basic load. Eight externally mounted smoke-grenade launchers can deploy a dense white obscuring cloud over a wide arc in a matter of seconds. A switch on the driver's panel can also be activated to dump raw fuel into the engine exhaust manifold, which generates dark obscuring smoke, at the cost of very high fuel consumption.

  On land, the AAV-7 can reach a maximum speed of 45 mph/72 kph. It can climb a 3-ft/.9-m vertical obstacle or cross a trench 8 ft/2.4 m wide. In addition, it can climb an astonishing 60% grade and negotiate a 40% slide-slope without tipping over. At 25 mph/40 kph, the maximum endurance is 300 mi/483 km. The driver has an AN/VVS-2 night-vision device, an electro-optical image intensifier, or "starlight scope," that amplifies even the weakest light. On water, the maximum speed is rated as 8 mph/13 kph, but this assumes a calm sea. The AAV-7 is not, however, limited to placid waters; it can operate in higher sea and surf conditions than any other landing craft used in the world's amphibious forces. Theoretically, the AAV-7 can cruise for up to seven hours at 6 mph/9.6 kph, but Marine doctrine, based on considerations of fatigue, control, and navigation, prescribes a run-in to the beach of no more than an hour. An efficient bilge pump serves to keep the crew compartment dry, even in rough seas. Standard navigation equipment is limited to a crude magnetic compass, but today many vehicles have a GPS receiver added to their equipment fit.

  In an assault from the sea, Marine platoons will typically embark on their AAV-7s inside the docking well of amphibious transport such as an LPD, LHD, or LSD. The transport will then flood its ballast tanks and open the stern gate, creating a gentle incline for the amtracs to crawl down into the water. They then turn on their water jets and head for the beach. The goal of the amtrac unit is to deliver its passengers safely as close as possible to the objective, where they will dismount and secure the area. The amtracs might then return to their mother ship to pick up a second wave of Marines, or a load of supplies--up to five tons of food, ammunition, and equipment. Note that the amtrac with its driver and gunner "belong" to an amphibious tractor battalion, while the passengers will generally be an embarked Marine infantry platoon belonging to a rifle company. During Desert Storm, most Marine platoons stayed with the same amtrac for the four days of the ground war, using them just like conventional armored personnel carriers.

  On dry land, the AAV-7 has severe tactical shortcomings, mostly because of its large size and limited armor protection (in Kuwait, the amtracs were supported by LAVs and main battle tanks). By itself, the AAV-7 is terribly vulnerable to enemy anti-armor weapons, since its thin aluminum armor was designed only to keep out small-arms fire and shell fragments. A bolt-on Enhanced Applique Armor Kit (EAAK) has been developed, which adds several thousand pounds of weight, but defeats the Soviet KPV 14.5mm armor-piercing machine gun, which is carried by many threat helicopters, light armored vehicles, and heavy weapon teams. One of the greatest threats to the crew of an armored vehicle is fire resulting from the penetration of a rocket-propelled grenade or anti-tank guided weapon. The amtrac now carries an automatic fire-suppression system, which combines super-fast-acting infrared sensors with quick-discharge bottles of Halon, an inert gas that snuffs out the fire before the fire can snuff out the crew. In practice, combat vehicles usually spend much of their time in battle with the engine idling, to keep the batteries charged and the radio operating while they wait for orders. The standard vehicle has three secure voice radios; but a special command version has six VHF, one UHF, and one HF set, plus a ten-station intercom system. Very soon, it will be fitted with the new SINCGARS-series radios, which will greatly improve the range and quality of communications for the big craft. As currently planned, the fleet of AAV-7s will have to serve about another fifteen years until the arrival of the new Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle, which is currently under development. Until roughly 2006, they will have to hold the line, and continue doing their uncomfortable, dangerous job.

  The Future: The Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAAV)

  A quiet little program run out of an office building in Arlington, Virginia, will provide a replacement for the long-serving AAV-7s. The Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAAV) is going to be the world's most advanced armored fighting vehicle, with capabilities previously undreamed of by Marines, or by soldiers of any nation. Our story begins back in the late 1970s when the Marines began to reevaluate their doctrine for forced entry amphibious operations. Ever since "Brute" Krulak took the first unit of amphibious tractors out on their evaluation trials, higher speed through the water has been a desired goal. There even was a stillborn p
rogram, the Landing Vehicle Assault (LVA) back in the 1970s, that was designed to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, the technology to achieve the lofty requirements of the LVA specification simply was not there, and the program was terminated in 1979.

  An Advanced Amphibious Assault Vehicle (AAAV) prototype during high-speed water trials. Production AAAVs will be able to transit over 25 nm/48 km fully loaded through heavy seas in less than an hour.

  UNITED DEFENSE

  Now, you did not need to have a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering back then to figure out that the nature of naval warfare was changing. These changes, though, did not invalidate the high-speed amphibious tractor requirement. On the contrary, it was being rapidly confirmed by current events. One look at any one of a dozen trade publications would have shown you the variety of weapons and systems being developed to attack surface vessels from ships, subs, planes, and shore bases. In short, the closer an amphibious task force approached an enemy shore, the more dangerous it was getting. Take, for example, the British experience in the Falklands War of 1982: In less than a month of amphibious and support operations, the Royal Navy lost two destroyers, two frigates, a pair of landing ships, and a container ship to Argentine air and missile attacks. Several times this number were damaged. The lessons were made clear for the whole world to see: Put yourself within visual range of a hostile shore, and you'll get shot with weapons that will likely hit you and hurt you.