[Warzone] The U.S. Marine Corps has decided to ban its entire fleet of tracked Amphibious Assault Vehicles, or AAVs, from taking part in "regularly scheduled deployments" or entering the water for any reason except to support emergency crisis response operations. This comes more than a year after an AAV sank during a training exercise, killing eight Marines and a U.S. Navy sailor, an accident that was attributed to a slew of maintenance, training, and leadership failures. The Corps is already working toward replacing its aging AAVs with new 8x8 wheeled Amphibious Combat Vehicles, or ACVs, but is also in process of scaling back its heavy vehicle capabilities — it notably began divesting all of its M1 Abrams tanks last year — as part of a radical redesign of its overall force structure.
The Marine Corps announced the new policies for employing its AAVs, a primary job of which is to move troops and equipment ashore from amphibious warfare ships, earlier today. It's not clear how many AAVs, of which there are a number of variants, the service has in inventory in total at present. A 2016 edition of The Military Balance, an authoritative guide to military forces around the world that is published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), a U.K.-based think thank, put the figure at 1,311 vehicles. |