It's official: After $450 billion, the Army's quick-moving force of the future will be just about as slow as the one that's around right now.
As I noted in June, one of the big ideas behind the Army's massive modernization effort, Future Combat Systems, was to make American troops more mobile – able to get around the world in a matter of days or weeks, instead of the months that are needed now.
The first step: slim down the service's cannon and armored vehicles. Today, it takes a gargantuan C-17 or C-5 transport plane to lug a single, 32-ton Paladin 155 mm howitzer. Army planners wanted the Paladin's next-gen replacement to weigh in at 19 tons or less – so one could fit inside a much smaller C-130 transport plane, instead.
After dancing around the issue for a couple of months, the Army has now delcared that neither the Paladin replacement nor any other FCS vehicle is going to fit into a C-130, according to Defense News' Greg Grant. And that "appears to abandon the fundamental rationale for FCS, which was intended to speed Army brigades to combat zones around the world within 96 hours."
The Army created the FCS concept about five years ago, after long delays in deploying a small air-ground task force to the Balkans raised questions about the service’s strategic relevance. Under Gen. Eric Shinseki, the Army’s former chief of staff, the service scrambled for lighter armored vehicles to replace heavy Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles...
[Army Secretary Francis] Harvey’s announcement appears to confirm that the Army does not have the technology to allow lighter vehicles to survive future anti-armor threats. This is in part a realization born of tough losses in Iraq, where 70-ton Abrams and Bradleys have been lost to roadside explosives and rocket-propelled grenades.
But more than FCS' weight requirement has changed. As recently as last year, the program was slated to cost $92 billion. Then, suddenly, that estimate ballooned -- first to $127 billion, and next to $145 billion. Finally, we were told that this gargantuan sum would only pay for transforming a third or less of the Army.
And what would be so different, after all that cash was spent? When the program first got started, the armored vehicles were not only going to be light -- they were going to be electric-powered. And they were going to fire laser weapons. Now, all of that has been dropped, understandably.
But even the more basic changes have seemed near-impossible to pull off. The effort to get all soldiers on a common radio, for example, is facing massive restructuring, after the project's main contractor, Boeing, seems to have flushed $5 billion and three years worth of work down the toilet.
"The government has not seen sufficient evidence of the contractor teams’ understanding of the scale of integration required… to ultimately achieve the program requirements," the Army told Boeing in an April letter. "Nor has the industry team displayed sufficient ability to estimate a cost and schedule baseline and rigorously manage to that baseline."
In other words, the radio project has become slow and bloated. Just like the rest of FCS.
first i dont hate on the army for god sake, the in there for the same reason as anyone in any branch second my father was a army sf iv seen him beet the living crap out of many before him and i see a lot of wisdom in him and third you are right about boot camp in marines its just basic skills not trying to stuff as much in themm and send them off to war, its said the only thing equall to a marine is an army ranger none are better then eachother but a regular army soilder fresh from basic and a marine fresh from basic easy pickn for that marine. so you can whine about it are you can suck it up (like a marine) and Acknowledge those marines and what they joined the marines for( if you think the army is so tough then why does the army have to compare there special forces to a normal marine{not that theres anything normal about them}that does not sound to tough)
Posted by: justin milam at June 9, 2009 03:09 PM