UHF/VHF unit, a UHF position-location reporting set, one HF radio, and a single portable VHF set.
• LAV–L—Armored units need a lot of supplies in order to accomplish their crucial jobs. Since logistics vehicles of LAV units come under the same kinds of fire as the combat vehicles, they need to be armored as well. For this reason, 94 LAV–L logistics versions were purchased. Based upon the LAV–C, the LAV–L is basically an open compartment for carrying supplies; and it is equipped with a 1,100-1b/500-kg manually powered crane for lifting heavy items like pallets and engines.
• LAV-M—One of the shortcomings of Marine armored units is that they have no organic armored artillery units like the Army's M 109A6 Paladin 155mm self-propelled howitzer. However, the Marines have developed and deployed fifty armored mortar carriers, based on the LAV. Called the LAV-M, it is equipped with an M252 81mm mortar and carries ninety-nine (five ready, ninety-four stowed) 81mm projectiles. Using the same open-compartment chassis as the LAV–L and C variants, it has a hatch over the rear compartment for the mortar to fire through. The LAV-M also carries a baseplate and bipod for operating the M252 dismounted.
• LAV-R-Nearly every family of armored vehicles breeds a recovery version, which can be used to haul broken or damaged vehicles to the rear for repair, and the LAV is no exception. The Marines have acquired forty-five of this type, designated LAV-R. Each LAV-R is equipped with a 9,000-1b/4,086-kg boom crane, a 30,000-lb/ 13,620-kg winch, a battery of floodlights, an electric welder, a 120/230-volt generator, and a 10-kw hydraulic generator. The crew consists of a driver, commander, and rigger who is cross-trained in welding and other maintenance/repair skills.
Other versions are currently in development, including an electronic-warfare (EW) version that has an array of direction-finding, intercept, and jamming equipment packed onboard. Watch for this LAV-EW version to appear before the turn of the century in USMC service. Other countries using versions of the LAV include Australia, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.
In combat, the LAV has acquired a reputation for reliability and effectiveness, in spite of its light armor and lack of a FLIR thermal sight system. During Desert Storm, LAVs acted as the armored cavalry for the units of I MEF, fixing and finding Iraqi units from the Battle of Al Kafji to the final liberation of Kuwait City. Tragically, the bulk of the LAV losses occurred from friendly fire: One LAV-25 was mistakenly destroyed by a TOW missile from an LAV- AT; and an errant AGM-65 Maverick missile from an Air Force A-10A killed another.
United Defense LVTP-7/AAV-7A1 (Landing Vehicle, Tracked, Personnel)
There is no more traditional Marine mission than to land on a beach and then storm inland to an objective. Doing this mission right calls for an extremely specialized kind of vehicle — the amphibious tractor. The amphibious tractor is a strange hybrid mixture of landing craft and armored personnel carrier, a seemingly impossible mix if you think about it. The first requirement for an amphibious landing craft is that it be a seaworthy boat. It needs to handle well in rough seas, and to be able to come ashore in plunging ocean surf — up to 10 ft/3 m high — without swamping or getting stuck. On top of that, the armored personnel carrier must have good cross-country mobility, all-around firepower, and protection for the crew, at least from small-arms fire and shell fragments. All of those requirements make for a design problem with daunting contradictions. Consider the following. You need to design a machine that can deliver a platoon of twenty-five Marines from a landing ship some miles offshore to a hostile beach, making at least 8 mph/13.5 kph. Then, the machine has to be able to crawl inland at 40 mph/64 kph. And it has to have both protection and firepower. The resulting design was neither subtle nor pretty. But it was a great improvement over previous Marine amphibious tracked vehicles.
The Marines call it an 'amtrac' (amphibious tractor), and it's the product of an evolution that began way back in the 1930s in Clearwater, Florida. Donald Roebling was an eccentric millionaire, the grandson of Washington Roebling, the visionary engineer who designed and built the Brooklyn Bridge. One of Roebling's pet projects was the 'Alligator,' an amphibious crawler designed to rescue hurricane survivors or downed aviators in the cypress swamps of the Everglades. Engineers at the nearby Food Machinery Company (FMC, which built orange juice canning equipment) helped him fabricate parts for the contraption in their spare time. In 1938, the Marines sent an officer to request a demonstration, but Roebling wasn't interested. Then came Pearl Harbor. And Roebling changed his mind. Even so, he maintained his quirky integrity: He refused to accept any royalties from the Government for his design patent, and when he discovered that the cost of building the first military prototype, the LVT-1, was $4,000 less than the Navy Department had allocated, he insisted on submitting a refund!
By the end of the war FMC (now the managing partners of United Defense) had built over eleven thousand LVT 'Water Buffaloes' in dozens of different types and modifications. They first saw action with the Marines at Guadalcanal in 1942 as cargo carriers, but their moment of glory came in the invasion of Tarawa in November 1943. Planners had miscalculated the tides and underestimated the difficulty of crossing the jagged coral reefs that encircled the tiny atoll. But the amtracs waddled ashore while the normal landing craft were stranded and shot to pieces, thus saving the day and the invasion. The Marines eventually organized a dozen amtrac battalions in the Pacific, and the U.S. Army even formed a few in Europe (these spearheaded the assault crossing of the flooded Rhine in the spring of 1945). Later, in the Korean War, amtracs played a key role in the Inchon landing.
When Marines were deployed in force to Vietnam in 1964, the standard amtrac was the LVTP-5, a forty-ton steel monster that carried thirty-seven men, with a ramp door at the bow and a gasoline engine in the rear. It was a good landing craft, but impractical for the jungles and rice paddies of Southeast Asia. The fuel tanks were located under the floor, which made the vehicle a death trap if it struck a mine. As a result, Marines generally preferred to ride on top, and contemporary photographs often show LVTP-5s decorated with improvised forts on their roofs made of sandbags and chain-link fence.
Even before our direct involvement in Vietnam, the shortcomings of the LVTP-5 were well known, and plans were afoot to make good its shortcomings. In 1963, the Marine Corps asked industry to develop a smaller, less costly amtrac with better cross-country performance. FMC's first LVTPX-12 prototype was finished in 1967; and with minor modifications, it entered production in 1971 as the LVTP-7. Production eventually ended in 1983 when an improved version, designated the LVTP-7A1 (also known as the Amphibious Assault Vehicle Seven — AAV-7A1), came into service. A total of 995 of the original vehicles have been rebuilt to the AAV-7A1 standard, joining 403 new production units. LVTP-7s also serve with the naval infantry of Argentina, Brazil, Italy, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and Venezuela.
The AAV-7 is a huge box of welded aluminum alloy, slightly pointy at one end, 26 ft/7.9 m long, 10 ft, 9 in./3.3 m wide, and 10 ft, 3 in./3.1 m high at the deck. Its EAAK armored version weighs 46,314 lb/21,052 kg empty. There is a lumpy weapons station/turret to starboard and smaller lumps for the platoon sergeant's and driver's hatches to port. Marines enter or exit through an enormous hydraulic-powered ramp at the stern, or through a small hinged door in the ramp itself. The accommodations inside can only be described as 'austere,' with a row of seats along each wall and a removable bench in the middle. The 400-hp Cummins diesel engine is mounted in the right front, where the massive engine block provides some measure of protection to the crew compartment behind it. The Marines who ride it like to complain about the ventilation system, which seems to suck the exhaust fumes directly into the crew compartment. Diesel fumes may smell awful, but diesel fuel is much less explosive than gasoline if your vehicle is hit. The same basic engine is used in the Army's M2/3 Bradley armored infantry fighting vehicle (IFV). The tracks on each side run over six road wheels, each with a torsion-bar suspension system. In the water, the vehicle is propelled by twin jet-pumps which draw water from above each track and spew it out at a rate of 14,000 gallons/53,000 liters per minute. Steering deflectors on the jet pumps allow the vehicle to turn completely around in its own length.
It was originally intended that the powered one-man turret would carry a German-designed 20mm automatic cannon and a 7.62mm coaxial machine gun. But this proved impractical and the production turret carried
