Marine Corps investing in light vehicles to take the load off troops' shoulders.

AuthorTadjdeh, Yasmin

The Marine Corps is taking advantage of commercial-off-the-shelf technology to equip troops with new logistics vehicles.

Infantry Marines recently received dozens of ultra light off-road vehicles to provide logistics support and help lighten their load, according to the service. The delivery in February came six months after the contract award to Polaris Defense for 144 diesel-powered MRZR-D4s.

The acquisition was part of the service's utility task vehicle program, said Mark Godfrey, vehicle capabilities integration officer at the Marine Corps' capabilities development directorate.

The rugged, all-terrain UTVs had a number of requirements, including the ability to carry four Marines, each weighing 250 pounds, and 500 pounds of cargo, or some variation of that, he noted. Additionally, the vehicles--which are roughly 12 feet long--needed to be internally transported by the MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft and the CH-53E Super Stallion helicopters.

"We've had a long-standing requirement for this type of internally transportable vehicle," he told National Defense. "We had Marines that were in special purpose MAGTFs [Marine Air-Ground Task Forces] and forward deployed that were being... placed in areas of operations, and they didn't have a logistics platform to support them once they hit the ground."

The service had been looking to equip infantry regiments with such a platform since 2004 when the Marine Corps drafted a joint operational requirements document, Godfrey said.

However, "during the process of the fielding, and some budget decisions that were made, we never fielded to that particular part of the Marine Corps," he said.

After continued feedback from operating forces asking for such a capability, the service went to work in 2012 to craft a universal need statement, and then throughout 2013 worked to better define the requirements, he said. In 2013 and 2014 the service began work with the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory to conduct user evaluations, Godfrey said.

"They had already been doing some work on ultralight vehicles. And as we kind of narrowed the path... [we] found a few things that were available... sooner rather than later," he said. "We ended up working with the warfighting lab to better define exactly how we would use this type of a vehicle especially in the infantry units."

The service needed the platform to have a diesel engine because it wanted it to use the same fuel as the rest of the Marine Corps' vehicles to reduce...

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