Rebuilding efforts anticipate a lengthy fight.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold
• Position: MARINE CORPS

QUANTICO, Va. -- The Marine Corps, as it struggles to rebuild, repair or replace its combat-battered equipment, is planning for a conflict that will continue for years to come.

"I'm not sure when this war is going to end," said Barry Dillon, the executive director of the Marine Corps Systems Command, which is responsible for developing the service's ground combat equipment. "Some say 10 years. Some say longer."

Brig. Gen. Raymond C. Fox, director of the Corps' programs division, agreed. "Nobody in this room is going to be alive when this war is over. We're in this for the long haul."

For the United States to prevail, "we're going to need your help," Dillon told defense industry executives who gathered recently here at this Marine base just outside the nation's capital.

Dillon appealed to companies to increase the speed of their development cycles. "We need to put things into service rapidly and support them adequately," he said. "We need to do a better job of getting ahead of the threat."

In particular, he said, the Marines need better technology for detecting and neutralizing improvised explosive devices, and lighter, sturdier armor for troops and vehicles.

"If and when that blast goes off," he asked, "how can we provide better protection for our Marines? It's very frustrating that the industrial base hasn't been able to do a better job at that."

Dillon noted that Marines are paying the highest toll in Iraq. "Their death rate is twice that of the Army; 10 times that of the Navy and 20 times that of the Air Force."

A major concern is designing transport that can protect occupants better and can be repaired more easily. "We've noticed that flat-bottomed vehicles don't do a very good job against IEDs," Dillon said. "They absorb the blast." By contrast, he added, platforms with V-shaped bottoms--such as the Cougar mine-protected vehicle--funnel some of the blast's impact away from the interior.

Often, Dillon noted, the bombs are so powerful that parts of vehicles are destroyed beyond repair. "Maybe we need to think about throw-away parts, rather than try to design them to survive an IED blast," he suggested. "That way, if parts are seriously damaged, we could just dispose of them and get new ones."

Unmanned aerial and ground vehicles need a common control station, he said. "You have an aerial vehicle, and it has a unique ground station designed for it. You do the same thing for ground vehicles. We can do better than that.

"We recommend a single tactical control system that can fly all aerial vehicles and operate all ground vehicles," Dillon said. "That would improve a whole lot of things."

In any case, Fox said, Marines and their contractors are going to have to get innovative in the years ahead because funding is likely to become more scarce. "Department of Defense funding is going to go down," he said.

Fox cited a projection by the Center for Strategic and Budget Assessments, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, showing that defense spending runs in peaks and valleys. It peaked at $450 billion a year in 1968, during the Vietnam War, then dropped during the '70s. It increased again under President Reagan, only to drop after the first Gulf War.

According to the projection, the defense budget--which reached $447.6 billion, including wartime supplements, in 2007--is likely to drop to $350 billion by 2012, Fox said.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the Marine Corps' budget also will decrease, he added, noting that Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker has argued that his service needs an increased portion of the defense budget because it is carrying a heavier combat load than other branches. "We said the same thing," Fox said. "We're different from the Navy and the Air Force."

One reason the Corps requires additional money, Fox said, is the need to...