“Now, enter the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, and it’s hanging in there around 22,000 pounds … we ask ourselves, is that the vehicle we need to be buying? If you go back and check the parameters, the JLTV was dependent upon technology to give us composite or plastic armor or something that would be light and yet serve the same purpose as steel. Well, it just hasn’t happened. And the experts will tell you, that’s still five years out.”

Which has left the Corps looking for a bridge vehicle, taking an approach similar to merging the MTVR’s 7-ton chassis with the MRAP, but this time making use of thousands of up-armored Humvees. In particular, replacing its flat chassis bottom and significantly increasing ground clearance.

“Now it’s 8 to 10 inches,” Conway said. “We need something two or three times that for blast mitigation, with a V-shaped bottom to have a protective compartment for the crew. And there are some manufacturers out there who think they can do that for about a 10th of the cost of a new vehicle.

“If we can come up with something that will give us that capacity for a few years, then we’re going to look at it.”

For Conway, even more immediate, however, is what he terms a “hot button issue” – equipment Reset.

“We’re facing sort of a vortex caused by several factors. One is the movement of equipment into Afghanistan from Iraq that we previously thought was going to be able to come home, go into a reconstitution or Reset phase, and get put up on a first-tier basis. We’ve [also] had a lot of equipment destroyed. Now, most of that is replaced by our Overseas Contingency Operations funds, so I can’t really say that’s a dramatic factor, but it certainly impacts on availability of equipment,” he said. “We used to have battalions with their entire T/E [Table of Equipment] in the warehouses and down at the motor pool, so if another contingency broke out, you load your kit and you go to war.

“Today we don’t have that wealth of equipment, so we use the training sets these units need in order to prepare themselves to go to Iraq or, increasingly now, Afghanistan. Part of the problem is … the T/E – what a battalion rated in 2003, for instance, is a fraction of what a battalion has on deck today in Afghanistan. Communications equipment is probably tenfold above what it was at that point, rolling stock 350 percent; heavy weapons the same way. That depletes our home-station allowances and causes us to be woefully short back in the states.”

The current situation also is partly due to a conscious decision by the Marine Corps not to draw down its maritime pre-positioned stocks.

“We have three squadrons out there afloat with a great deal of Marine equipment. That is our sort of national reserve, our ability to respond to a crisis elsewhere. The ships sail there, the Marines fly in, they link up with the equipment that’s kept in great shape, and we do what we have to do,” Conway said. “The Army hasn’t done that, so the Army conditions are a little better than ours in terms of readiness and availability of equipment. But the Army goes to theater with their equipment, then they bring their equipment home. We leave ours there. It saves money, but it also means that equipment is not available for reset or rework.

“And so it’s starting to reach a little bit of crisis proportion. It’s fair to say our equipment readiness at home station today is not what we would want it to be to be able to train and/or deploy to another crisis elsewhere. We simply need to start laying in some more procurement dollars and get some of that equipment so we can have a better picture on Reset. Congress has been very good to us, up to a point. At one point there, we were about 75 percent of need. Today it’s only about 50 percent.”

As for the future of Marine operations in Afghanistan, Conway remains cautiously optimistic, but does not expect a quick repeat of the ongoing withdrawal from Iraq. What he does expect, by mid- to late-2010, is being able to maintain a 2-1 dwell-to-deploy ratio – 14 months home to seven months in theater – by combining the ongoing 27,000-man increase in the size of the Corps with a limit of fewer than 20,000 deployed to Afghanistan. As to seeing them all coming home by the second half of 2011, however, “we’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then.”

“My belief, at this point, is [the reduction of American forces 18 months from now] will be in the lesser contested areas. Helmand does not fall into that category. So what that means to us as Marines is yet to be determined,” he concluded. “We intend on making good progress, but I have to be honest, I’d be surprised if we’re in that initial tranche of turnover by, say, 2011.”