Meet The Growler

Our Beloved Corps is taking some hits over what is being billed as an acquisitions goat-rope concerning the newest fast attack vehicle, the Growler (shown below towing a 120mm mortar from a 2005 article in USAToday).

Quoth the WaPo:

The idea for such a vehicle was developed in 1999 by the Marine Corps, which wanted a vehicle that could be carried in the V-22 Osprey aircraft to support assault operations and that would tow a 120mm mortar and an ammunition trailer.

Today, instead of one vehicle that could serve both functions, there are two — one for reconnaissance and a shorter version that tows the mortar and ammunition trailer — built by the same company.

The first Growlers in the mortar program — officially called internally transportable vehicles, or ITVs — have been deployed to Marine units, but with limited combat capabilities. Because of their light armor and ammunition safety problems, “you can’t run it up the highway in an urban area such as Iraq,” said John Garner, the Marines’ program manager for the vehicle. “But it could accompany foot-mobile Marine infantry in a not-built-up area such as Afghanistan,” he added.

There is no further elaboration on “ammunition safety problems.”

Naturally, there’s drama over the contractors.

Troubles with the two systems started in 2004 during the final competition between two bidders for the vehicle contract. One bidder was a team of the giant defense contractor General Dynamics Corp. and a small company called American Growler Inc. of Ocala, Fla., known primarily for building a successful dune buggy using surplus, customized Army M151A2s, a popular version of the military jeep. The other was a contractor in Michigan called Rae-Beck Automotive LLC, which built a popular neighborhood electric car.

By choosing General Dynamics and American Growler, the Marines were able to procure an existing vehicle that was equipped with components that could be purchased “off the shelf,” avoiding costs of research and developing an entirely new vehicle. While the Rae-Beck entry was found to be superior in some tests, the Growler, according to Garner, was better “in the most important ones.”

The comments in the WaPo article are, as usual, pretty instructive. One of them advocated dusting off the old M151 Super Jeeps (see quote above). I’m old enough and Old Corps enough to remember the Super Jeeps in 24 MEU SOC in 92-94. THEY WERE OLD THEN, AND MORE OFTEN THAN NOT HAD TO PUSHED ON AND OFF THE 53S. Nice try, but no dice. (Among other problems, they’re manual shift vehicles. How about that for a training issue?)

I’m just glad we have something that can run on and off the V-22 and pull that nice heavy mortar. If that whole package works, then the price tag will be seen in a different light.