The Advanced Recon Vehicle will replace the Light Armored Vehicle (LAV). It will go beyond intelligence gathering. It will analyze the data.


What is the Marine Corps' Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle? - Breaking Defense

As the Pentagon increasingly focuses on the primacy of battlefield information through its Joint All Domain Command and Control efforts, the Marine Corps’ quest for a new reconnaissance vehicle is focused not just on traditional battlefield intelligence gathering, but the ability to ingest and process data from across the joint force.


Now, after five years of technology demonstrators and other preliminary efforts, the service has two companies — General Dynamics Land Systems and Textron Systems — on track to deliver their final versions of the Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle (ARV) to the service for evaluation in December. An announcement declaring a winner is not expected to come until late next year, but just last month the companies put prototypes through swim testing to make sure they are ready for the end-of-year deadline, executives said.


With a contract worth up to $6.8 billion at stake for the prevailing bid and amid some skepticism of the program from the very top of the Corps, Breaking Defense spoke to both vendors to understand what they hope the ARV will bring to the fight and how the new combat vehicle intersects with two emerging Pentagon interests: information warfare and unmanned systems.

“The Advanced Reconnaissance Vehicle (ARV) is imperative to realizing Marine Corps requirements for Fleet Marine Force 2030,” the services wrote of the program in its latest budget request to lawmakers. “As part of the portfolio of reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition systems, ARV will be a purpose-built combat vehicle system, highly mobile on land and water, that can sense, communicate, and fight as the manned hub of a robotic and autonomous systems-enhanced team.”