Marine’s New Armored Amphibian May Get The Gates Treatment | Defense Tech: "Under sunny skies at Quantico, with a crowd of several hundred well wishers and the Marine Corps museum as a backdrop, the Marines displayed the latest prototype of their swimming armored personnel carrier, the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV). They unveiled it not quite 24 hours after Defense Secretary Robert Gates publicly questioned the very need for the costly new vehicle.
In one of his now trademark policy shifting speeches, this one at the Navy League’s annual conference, Gates pointed to the tracked amphibian as one of two examples, the other being carriers, of weapons that fall into a yawning gap “between the capabilities we are pursuing and those that are actually needed in the real world of tomorrow.” His view is that real world is unlikely to see the need for the very niche capability provided by the EFV: transporting Marines at high speed from over the horizon onto heavily defended beaches. The EFV is not that much of a departure from the original Amtrak, which was designed to crawl over coral in the face of formidable Japanese defenses."
