The FCS lobby is loading up the bombs, feeding the ammo belts and launching the salvos.
While the Pentagon's official position is that the FCS program will be radically restructured and the ground vehicle programs killed, Army and industry officials are acting as if "there's nothing to see here."
On Tuesday, FCS co-prime Boeing released a statement saying it had completed a "System of Systems Preliminary Design Review" and, guess what, it totally validated the FCS program and showed how much better the Army would be with the entire web of sensors, robots, ground vehicles and networks.
The SoS PDR is the most comprehensive review of the program to date. It validated that the designs for all FCS systems and subsystems, including the network, sensors, weapons and manned and unmanned vehicles, meet current requirements and will function as an integrated system of systems. The review proved that a family of networked systems will provide greater combat capabilities, including enhanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, across the full spectrum of conflict.
No way!? So all this talk about vulnerable vehicles, network bandwidth problems and schedule slips is baloney?
And our boy Greg Grant from DoD Buzz reports that Gen. George Casey, the Army's chief of staff, had a momentary bout of honesty when he told the SASC this week that he didn't ask for or want the FCS rejiggering but he'd been forced to back it.
Asked by SASC chair Senator Carl Levin whether he agreed with Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ decision to cancel the FCS vehicles, Casey said: “I supported it; I did not agree with it.” The fundamental point of disagreement, he said, was whether the vehicle design included sufficient protection against IEDs.
Oh, the boxes we get put in...
And yesterday the Pentagon announced a hastily-called together press conference for today where Army officials would help reporters understand the service's modernization program for Brigade Combat Teams. One wonders what they would have said had not the presser been cancelled this morning without prejudice.
I have always believed that the FCS program was far too complex to execute both technologically and fiscally as a total package but was tailor made as a sort of service "Skunk Works" that could develop the associated technologies for futuristic solutions to aging platforms and incrementally populate them within the force. It's as if you're working toward that Buck Rogers goal every day knowing full well you won't get there but that at least part of the fruits of your labors will be incorporated into forces who need them today.
The Army's going to need a replacement for the Bradley and M1 soon and as the development of the JLTV shows, there's lots of cutting edge solutions or just beyond the edge ones that could make the next set of ground vehicles more deadly to bad guys and safer for Joes. Or are we at a tipping piont here -- kind of like the one the Air Force is struggling with -- where it's all just a waste of money spent on manned systems. Is it close enough for us to envision robot ground vehicles pummeling enemy redoubts instead of manned ones in the next "generation?"
Maybe so...
-- Christian Lowe
Is NLOS Worth It?
I always sort of roll my eyes when I look at the defense authorization bill each year and see Sen. James Inhofe's successful attempt to cordon off the Non-Line of Sight cannon developed by the Army's FCS program from any budget cuts -- kind of reminds me of the JSF alternative engine.
Instead of parochialism, it all really boils down to whether the Army needs a replacement for the Paladin mobile Howitzer gun. And I reluctantly come out on the side of "yes."
I'm going to excerpt Greg Grant's excellent story from DoD Buzz today and draw your attention to a comment made on the story -- really a comment about a comment:
As we reported the other day, the Army’s $200 billion Future Combat Systems modernization program looks likely to suffer some big hits when the defense budget is finally wrapped some time later this month. Rumors of FCS doom have its champions in Congress, chief among them being Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., vowing to fight for the perennially troubled program.
Dear to Inhofe’s heart, and his constituents, is the Non-Line Of Sight Cannon, originally part of FCS. It was given its own budget line by Inhofe in an effort to fence it off from possible cuts to the larger program. Why? Well, Oklahoma is home to Ft. Sill, the Army’s artillery center for one thing and NLOS-C builder BAE Systems kindly said it would produce the cannon in Elgin, Okla. Inhofe has included language in past defense bills telling the Army to build a number of prototypes and rapidly move NLOS-C into full-scale production.
The NLOS-C is a continuation of the Army’s Crusader mobile howitzer program that was unceremoniously cancelled by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld; many of the parts used in the NLOS-C were originally designed for Crusader. It is intended to replace the Paladin 155mm self-propelled howitzer, and is optimized for long range counter-battery fire on a conventional battlefield. In a statement released by his office this week, Inhofe said: “To say that FCS and the NLOS-C are designed for a conventional war is narrow-minded and overlooks the reality that the systems that FCS will replace are being used on the battlefields today in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
Over the past eight years, battles in Afghanistan’s road-less and mountainous terrain have certainly demonstrated the need for organic fire support to light infantry, but of the mortar variety, or perhaps a lightweight “mountain” cannon, not a large, tracked mobile howitzer. In Iraq, the Army’s Paladins spend their tours of duty parked in the motor pool as the “red legs” go off to patrol as motorized infantry.
The Paladin is more than adequate to give the Army’s maneuver formations mobile fire support if they square off against an enemy mechanized army any time in the near future. To counter insurgent mortar and rocket fire in Iraq, air strikes from fixed wing or attack helicopters have proven more responsive and accurate than artillery fire, if for no other reason than the air space must be cleared before artillery can fire, an often lengthy process.
And here's what commenter Cole said:
To add to what Armywonk said, I will quote Stryker Radar from another post who apparently is an artilleryman with 3 Iraq tours and a strong belief in FCS:
============================================
“…how is the NLOS-C worthless in today’s fight? Can it sit on a FOB and fire in support of troops? Yep. Can it fire GPS guided projoes? Yep, has that one cover also. Can it fire counter-btry in support of C-RAM? Yep, got that one also.”
“The real question is this: Can the Paladin do what the NLOS-C does? Load at any elevation? Auto-load from the on-board magazine by the push of a button from the Section Chief? Shoot a Zone 4 mission without dropping the spades? Drive around the battlefield on just battery power alone? Can the Paladin send a computer generated PTM to the AFATDS at the PLT/ BTRY FDC, BN FDC, and BDE FECC level saying what’s wrong with it and what maintenance assets it needs?”
===========================================
I will add that Mr Zaloga is not an engineer, but a history major. Considering that a far lighter M-777 somehow manages to fire 155mm rounds without beating itself to death, I question his credentials to claim the FCS NLOS-Cannon won’t be up to task. Did you catch Stryker Radar’s mention about not putting the spades down and still being able to fire?
Next, the primary mission is not counter-battery as Mr. Grant implied. It is a primary BCT-support indirect fire system. Indirect fire is historically the greatest killer on the battlefied and there is no reason to believe that trend will not continue in future warfare.
It exposes a two-man crew to far less danger than the 5-man crew in a Paladin. When equipped with all around active protection and future sloped underbody armor counter-IED kit the system will ensure cannoneers greater survivability…and serve as a near-common basis for other manned ground vehicle systems essential for future warfare.
Finally, to add to what Armywonk mentioned on SOF forces, we continue to see heroic battles between extremely small SOF units and larger Taliban forces. Why do we feel the need to make our SOF fight so outnumbered and heroically while severely outnumbered. The Iraq surge showed, as will the Afghan one, that you need adequate force on the ground. SOF alone doesn’t cut it.
I tend to agree with him. I think mobile, high powered organic fire support is the answer to greater distribution of operations. I fell in love with CAS back in the early Afghan war days, but have grown more bearish on it since I've seen it more and more in action and the ground and really question its accuracy and, particularly, its response.
The Army and senior OSD leadership are debating whether to eliminate all but one of the eight FCS vehicles, a Hill source says. The sole surviving vehicle would be, not surprisingly, the Non Line of Sight Cannon.
But the plan being considered would save a relatively paltry $500 million in 2010. As the Hill source noted, the FCS network and software comprise "most" of the R and D money.
Also, an industry source pointed out that as the number of vehicles in the program shrinks, so does the viability of the network. “The development of the FCS network is linked to the development of FCS Manned Ground Vehicles. Each MGV acts as a node in the ground based aspect of the network. So cutting MGVs reduces the viability of the network,” the industry source said.
But because so much of the FCS program depends on economies of scale from building vehicles on a common chassis, the Army would be hard pressed to save a great deal. The Hill source noted that half of the research and development costs are for the chassis and you would still be developing and building the chassis, no matter how many vehicles you killed.
The Army wanted had a very different plan to restructure the Future Combat System in the out years, but the OSD said no to it because it saved almost nothing in the short term. Now the Army is wrestling with those notorious meanies at PA and E over the program’s very future.
Of course, building NLOS would help remove one very prominent irritant, from the Pentagon’s point of view. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) has prodded and pushed the Army for years to build NLOS and to build as many of them as possible. He wants to protect jobs at Fort Sill, the Army’s artillery center.
[Editor's note: Inhofe has each year pushed language in the fiscal year defense authorization bill that specifically protects the NLOS cannon and launch system from cancellation if FCS as a program faces cuts...Read the rest of Colin's story, and keep up with the steady trickle of '10 DoD Budget leaks at DoD Buzz.]
-- Colin Clark
A Rare Glimpse Inside FCS Armor
The vulnerabilities, components and processes used to make armor are rarely discussed with reporters, or the general public. Keeping those things secret saves soldiers lives. So when the Army’s testing community rolled out the service’s top armor scientists and allowed us glimpses of the facilities used to make armor as part of our FCS tour at Aberdeen Proving Ground they sent a very clear message of the importance they attach to this enormous program.
After a briefing by two top Army materiel scientists, the group of reporters trudged in to a large room that looked like a cross between a package wrapping station for a small mail-order company (big rolls of flat and bubbly plastics) and an enormous art studio, with several giant presses and kilns dominating the structure. Everyone’s heard of ceramic armor and Kevlar, but few have seen the seemingly ordinary stuff that helps make armor really effective. The two scientists had laid out on a big metal table more than a dozen samples of various armor components. One mat roughly the size of a dinner table mat looked like woven glass fibers. There was a roll of something that felt and looked remarkably like magnetic tape. Of course, there was a ceramic substance that had been shattered in some sort of ballistic test. Next to it was a big thick wad (maybe three inches thick) of surprisingly light aluminum.
Ernie Chin, from the Army Research Laboratory, told us that some armor variants involve ceramics or other materials bonded to metal matrices (of which there were several examples including one that looked a lot like a honeycomb), perhaps with layers of glass, plastics or other more exotic materials. “The whole point is, how do we put all this together,” he said.
All these materials had apparently been used in the search to create the “B” armor for FCS. They are using what is called B-1 armor now and plan to come up with two more variants, using B-3 as the main armor once the FCS vehicles make it to LRIP in fiscal 2013.B-1 provides, a very careful public affairs officer told me, protection roughly equivalent to the Chobham armor on the Abrams tanks. The next variants should be much lighter and provide even greater protection.
After peering knowingly at all this stuff, we headed out by bus to the real world, where we saw battered evidence of the progression the scientists have marched along with the testing community. Past a guarded (and very tall) gate, out past very uninhabited portions of Maryland wetlands and forests we rolled past a few battered-looking MRAPs to a very large set of armored targets for ballistic projectiles.
These included early versions of the FCS armor that were bolted on to an aluminum inner hull, a fact that Col. Gregory Martin, chief of the Army’s J-8 director’s initiative group, told us was “revolutionary” because it would allow armor to be swapped on vehicles as the armor is improved instead of the current state of the art which only allows so-called appliqué armor to be put on top of the existing stuff. The scientists talking us through these test targets said all the armors and the improvements made to them had performed well or extremely well. Of course, we couldn’t expect them to share the exact vulnerabilities and performance characteristics of the armor, though several of us tried…
One of the wow moments during the initial armor briefing came when the Army’s top armor researcher, Chris Hoppel, told us that the modeling they do on exactly how and why armor performs during a test would occupy a personal computer for about one year. Using various government supercomputers, the Army can get the job done “overnight.”
Associated Press
WASHINGTON - The Army will deliver some key technologies to ground forces in war zones three years ahead of schedule as part of its $160 billion Future Combat Systems program led by Boeing Co. and SAIC Inc.
Senior Army officials on June 26 said changes to the FCS program will expedite the use of high-tech equipment, including unmanned sensors and robotics, to infantry brigades fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2011.
Portions of FCS were expected to be used by armored units by 2014, but Army officials say the technology being developed is needed for the current war effort.
Lt. Gen. Michael A. Vane, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, said accelerating FCS and other complementary programs will help "filling the gaps" created by huge demands on the infantry brigades, while increasing the effectiveness and safety of U.S. soldiers.
Army officials maintain that while costs may rise in the short-term from the new schedule, they will balance out in future years and will not raise the program's overall price tag, which has been criticized by lawmakers.
Lead contractors Boeing and SAIC said the Army's decision to accelerate the FCS technologies shows confidence in the program's progress. FCS includes 14 manned and unmanned systems that are linked through a secure communications network.
On Wednesday, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey briefed Defense Secretary Robert Gates on plans to restructure the program. Gates, who backed the shift, told reporters at a separate briefing Thursday that FCS "deserves support."
Dan Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, said it appears that the Army "didn't want to repeat the same mistake" as the Air Force in battling Gates publicly over F-22 jets made by Lockheed Martin Corp. Gates also has previously raised doubts about the FCS program.
"Clearly this show that Gates is in command in a way few secretaries have been of the services," said Goure.
A few lawmakers lauded the Army's choice to deploy the latest technology to soldiers in the field. But House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., and Hawaii Democrat Neil Abercrombie, chairman of the air and land subcommittee, expressed concern that the new plan "may not allow for adequate testing of the equipment due to its very tight schedule."
The FCS program has long been criticized for remaining over budget and behind schedule. Earlier this year, the House Armed Services Committee voted to cut about $200 million from the Army's request of $3.6 billion for the FCS program in the fiscal 2009 budget.
"The Army has struggled to justify FCS for years, this is the latest evolution in this saga," said Nick Schwellenbach, an analyst for the Project on Government Oversight. "Yet at least now FCS may now end up helping troops currently deployed overseas."
-- Christian
FCS Can't Get Any Love
In the key areas of defining and developing FCS capabilities, requirements definition is still fluid, critical technologies are immature, software development is in its early stages, the information network is still years from being demonstrated, and complementary programs are at risk for not meeting the FCS schedule.
Even though the development of FCS will finish late in its schedule, commitments to production will come early. Production funding for the first spinout of FCS technologies and the early version of the FCS cannon begin in fiscal years 2008 and 2009.
Why? Because the Oklahoma congressional delegations insist on it for Ft. Sill's sake.
Production money for the core FCS systems will be requested beginning in February 2010, with the DOD fiscal year 2011 budget request—just months after the go/no-go review and before the stability of the design is determined at the critical design review. In fact, by the time of the FCS production decision in 2013, a total of about $39 billion, which comprises research and development and production costs, will already have been appropriated for the program, with another $8 billion requested.
Doesn't this seem a little backwards? Of course it does. If you're smart, get the money first -- before you've determined if the system really works, right? Can you imagine if we were saying the same thing about missile defense?
Also, the Army plans to contract with its lead system integrator for the initial FCS production, a change from the Army’s original rationale for using an integrator. This increases the burden of oversight faced by the Army and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
No way...make it too confusing for anyone else to make sure you're executing the contract in the most efficient manner? Nobody would ever do that!
Competing demands from within the Army and DOD limits the ability to fund higher FCS costs. Thus, the Army will likely continue to reduce FCS capabilities in order to stay within available funding limits.
Again...ouch...
Can we please just call the FCS program what it really is: a technology incubator program, a giant R&D effort for the ground pounders, please? I worry that the Army could begin slipping into the Air Froce trap by defining its future by a specific program.
-- Christian
A New Look at FCS
Our friends over at the Center for Defense Information have provided DT with an interesting primer on the Army’s Future Combat Systems program.
Contributor Winslow Wheeler explains:
The Future Combat Systems (FCS) program is central to the U.S. Army’s vision of its “transformation” in response to perceived challenges in the post-Cold War world.
Since beginning in 2000, the program has encountered large cost increases, schedule delays and difficulties in developing the systems’ new and complex technologies. Some have challenged the fundamental concept of the FCS as an example of the failed, so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs.”
CDI Research Associate Ana Marte and Research Assistant Elise Szabo provide an overview of the FCS program and links to many additional sources.
(Photo from Boeing)
-- Christian
Getting Greasy with FCS
The Army has opened a $1-million engine test facility for its $200-billion Future Combat Systems program amid Congressional concerns that the ambitious modernization program costs too much and fails to improve upon existing weapons.
The test facility at the Tank-Automotive Research and Development Center (TARDEC) in Warren, Michigan, includes several bays where engineers from the Army and from General Dynamics -- one of several major defense firms associated with FCS -- can install prototype hybrid-electric engines and their associated generators and put them through power loads simulating use in combat. Hybrid engines are slated for installation in the FCS manned vehicles, the first of which would enter service around 2014.
Major Scott Tufts from the FCS mobility program office says an engine currently getting a workout at TARDEC will be fitted to a test model of the BAE Systems Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon, the FCS howitzer, in August. A partial howitzer prototype mounted on an improvised, old-fashioned chassis is already undergoing firing tests at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
Before the 5.5-liter, five-cylinder engine can be installed on the howitzer prototype, engineers at TARDEC must map its performance across a wide range of power loads and in extreme environmental conditions. “We can take the engine anywhere on the power map. We can do starting and backing up,” says John Srodawa, a General Dynamics engineer. Plus TARDEC’s test bays can be heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit in order to simulate high noon in the world’s hottest deserts.
The first engine to undergo testing has so far logged around 110 hours in the bay, in bursts no longer than three hours, according to Srodawa. But he says that testing will soon ramp up to full power for up to 10 hours at a time. “The goal is to acquire enough data to map the engine’s efficiency.” That, he adds, will help engineers answer the question, “How do we optimize the engine and generator so that they give us the best fuel consumption?”
Despite testing progress, Congress has questioned FCS’ schedule and goals. This month the House Armed Services Committee voted to cut $900 million from the program’s 2008 budget, saying that war expenses and an Army-wide maintenance backlog were more urgent -- and that FCS duplicates some existing Army capabilities. The proposed cut comes on the heels of the Army’s decision last year to defer four of the 18 vehicles and robots planned for FCS in order to save money.
But even if the House cut sticks, FCS would still get nearly $3 billion next year. And Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii) from the House committee says that’s plenty for FCS to meet its 2008 goals, including full installation of the first hybrid engine.
-- David Axe
FCS Budget Woes Continue
Despite a full-bore public relations campaign to press lawmakers into supporting the Army’s Future Combat System program, it looks like Congress wasn’t buying the service’s pitch.
According to a report by Tony Capaccio with Bloomberg News, House authorizers slashed the FCS budget 23 percent, cutting nearly $870 million from the Army’s fiscal 2008 request. According to service budget documents, the Army asked for $3.7 billion in 2008 to pay for the following:
Continuing development, testing and delivery of unmanned aerial vehicles, unattended ground sensors and unmanned ground vehicle prototypes.
Completing preliminary platform design reviews and initiating critical design reviews.
Continuing development of the FCS network, including delivery of the battle command network and software to support key testing events and Spin Out 1.
Completing technical field testing (TFT), force development testing and evaluation (FDT&E) and limited user testing (LUT) for Spin Out 1.
Delivering early prototypes of the Non-Line-Of-Sight-Cannon (NLOS-C) Manned Ground Vehicle.
Continuing development of the short-range countermeasure active protection system.
The $867 million cut is the largest since the program was proposed in 2003. Cuts in the past two years have averaged about 10 percent.
This latest cut could be overturned by the Senate Armed Services Committee when it completes its version of the fiscal 2008 spending measure later this month.
At $161 billion, the Future Combat Systems is the Pentagon's second-most-costly program, behind the $276 billion Joint Strike Fighter.
Since fiscal 2003, the program's research-and-development phase has slipped five years and the final fielding date by seven years.
And the House Armed Services Committee’s red pen didn’t stop there…
The committee recommended that the program be reopened to competition. In voting to kill Textron's stewardship, the committee cited a long list of problems.
The program's development phase has grown to more than $300 million from $210 million, and the per-aircraft price has nearly doubled -- to almost $10 million from $5.2 million, according to Army officials.
Like the story says, the money for FCS – and the ARH, for that matter - could be restored by the Senate Armed Services Committee and put back into the final bill during the conference markup. But at a time when the world’s attention is focused on current operations and counterinsurgencies, it’s hard to see how the Army’s sales pitch is going to take hold.
The cornerstone of the Army Future Combat System has come under more scrutiny this month with a scathing article in National Defense magazine that shows a key communications program is underperforming and taking too long to bear fruit.
The Joint Tactical Radio System has been touted by Army planners as a key ingredient in the FCS “system of systems,” allowing soldiers to communicate across the networks on a common radio architecture. The plan makes sense, and builds on revelations from the attacks on 9/11 that showed various government and civilian agencies couldn’t communicate with each other because they used distinct radio systems and networks.
The FCS (BCT) Family-of-Systems (FoS) are connected to the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) network by a multilayered transport layer with unprecedented range, capacity and dependability. The primarily mobile transport layer provides secure, reliable access to information sources over extended distances and complex terrain. The network will support advanced functionalities such as integrated network management, information assurance and information dissemination management to ensure dissemination of critical information among sensors, processors and warfighters both within, and external to the FCS (BCT)-equipped organization.
The FCS (BCT) transport layer does not rely on a large and separate infrastructure because it is primarily embedded in the mobile platforms and moves with the combat formations. This enables the command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) network to provide superior Battle Command (BC) on the move to achieve offensive-oriented, high-tempo operations.
The FCS (BCT) transport layer is comprised of several heterogeneous communication systems including the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) and Warfighter Information Network-Tactical (WIN-T). FCS (BCT) leverages all available resources to provide a robust, survivable, scalable and reliable heterogeneous communications network that seamlessly integrates ground, near ground, airborne and space-borne assets for constant connectivity and layered redundancy.
The FCS (BCT) Network Management System will be utilized to manage the entire FCS (BCT) network including radios with different waveforms, platform routers, and local area networks (LANs), information assurance elements, and hosts. It provides a full spectrum of management capabilities required during all mission phases, including pre-mission planning, rapid network configuration upon deployment in the area of operations, monitoring the network during mission execution and dynamic adaptation of network policies in response to network performance and failure conditions.
The military has been trying for years to standardize its radio communications but has run up against some serious technical and hardware barriers that still keeps common radios out of the troops’ hands. Remember stories about field commanders using Thuraya satellite phones and Aol Instant Messaging to pass information across the battlefield during the ground invasion of Iraq in 2003?
From National Defense…
During the past four years, the services (mostly the Army) have spent nearly $4 billion on new radios. By comparison, between 1998 and 2001, their radio purchases amounted to less than $1 billion, according to Defense Department estimates. More than 60 percent of all radios procured are either individual handheld or squad-level manpack.
Before the war, the services were not allowed to purchase radios unless they obtained a “JTRS waiver” from the office of the assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration. The policy aimed to discourage purchases of non-JTRS radios.
But Army officials complained that the waiver was a bureaucratic burden that hindered their ability to rapidly deliver radios to troops in Iraq. The Pentagon subsequently agreed to suspend the waiver, although it recently approved a limited policy that only applies to single-channel handheld radios.
Radio manufacturers, who had envisaged a financial boon from JTRS contracts, gradually realized that they could make better profits by ramping up production of existing radios in response to the military’s surging demand. Some contractors privately admit they have soured on JTRS, especially once they saw that their customers in the armed services had begun to lose confidence in the program.
So, National Defense shows Pentagon officials are starting to back off their forceful endorsement of JTRS, allowing the services to purchase more modern versions of the radios they have now.
As the program continues to lose support across the military services, Defense Department officials are engineering a last-ditch effort to save what is increasingly a shaky procurement plan. They also are backing away from earlier demands that the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps stop buying their own service-unique radios in favor of a “joint” family of radios.
They’re better, for sure, but they still lock the services on their own communications track keeping the disjointed comms problem alive and raising yet more questions about the viability of the FCS program.
"I’d say we’ve done a reasonable job of managing the balance between risk and reward – reward being the ultimate performance of the system," said Dr. Thomas Killion, the Army's chief scientist, of Future Combat Systems during a January interview in his Pentagon office. "And we’re very cognizant of the risk associated with the various systems."
In recent months, the sprawling, ambitious FCS program -- meant to equip a third of the Army's 70 combat brigades with a family of new networked vehicles at a cost of around $300 billion -- has taken a couple big hits. Several of the program's airborne and ground robots have been deferred and more cuts are looming as the defense budget gets squeezed by war costs. FCS, with its delicate "system of systems" approach, remains a big technological risk in many lawmakers' minds, making it vulnerable to gradual paring. Still, Dr. Killion remains optimistic:
Yes, we’ve gone forward with some risk, but I think we’re managing that risk in a reasonable fashion. Every time we’ve gone through an independent review where I’ve put people together from outside to review the technology for FCS, they’ve come back saying you’re doing a reasonable job managing risk and we believe you’ll ultimately be successful. I know there are a lot of questions out there about [technology readiness levels] and FCS, but we’re doing a reasonable job when you go in and look at the details. ...What a lot of people would like us to do is manage it as piece-parts, essentially like traditional acquisition programs: platform X, platform Y and so on, each one managed as a separate program. Personally, I think that that would add new risk and complication to fielding the next generation of systems to the Army.
Look at what FCS was intended to do – that is, to achieve as much commonality as possible across platforms so that we have a common logistics tail, common sets of components which reduces production costs, and also (and I think the biggest thing) to ensure interoperability in software and subsystems cutting across those various platforms. What we’ve had in the past are things like the Abrams [tank] and the Bradley [fighting vehicle], where we spent a lot of time and effort in the “digitization” period in late ‘90s figuring out how to kluge together capabilities to make those platforms talk to one another. FCS, it’s designed in from the beginning that these systems will talk to one another and collaborate, because they share a common operating environment, common communications environments and common interfaces. We ensure from the beginning that all these platforms share the capabilities we want them to and can work together as a team, both manned and unmanned systems.
As expected, the Army has eliminated funding for its high tech soldier ensemble, Land Warrior, in its budget for 2008. The gear -- a collection of radios, electronic maps, and next-gen rifle scopes -- was finally supposed to connect the average infantryman into the growing network for combat. But the Army never could figure out the seemingly-endless weight and usability issues.
DOD planners dream up expensive systems... while ignoring the obvious success of modern digital device formats, such as cellphones, PDAs and even iPods. You may not be able to tap out a text message on a cellphone during a firefight as easily as with the Land Warrior, but what are you doing text messaging anyways? That's what the radio is for!
But Land Warrior isn't quite dead, yet. The 4th Battalion, 9th Infantry will still be taking more than 200 Land Warrior uniforms to Iraq, later on this year. The systems were already bought and paid for, in earlier budgets. And the hope is that Land Warrior performs so well under fire that the Army's chiefs have no choice but to turn the program's cash spigot back on. "It's kind of a Hail Mary pass," one Pentagon insider tells me.
Also, as expected, the Army will trim its mongo modernization project, Future Combat Systems, by cutting "two classes of unmanned aerial systems, one unmanned ground system and remov[ing] the Intelligent Munition System [a sort of smart landmine] from the program," Inside Defense reports. Army budget director Lt. Gen. Dave Melcher says the changes will save $3.3 billion over five years. FCS will still cost taxpayers $10.6 billion in fiscal year 2008 alone, if the Pentagon's budget goes through. Plus, there will be another $222 million for the Warfighter Information Network - Tactical, which is designed to help troops on the battlefield plug into info networks through satellite, airborne and terrestrial links. That's a nearly 100% increase over the previous year.
Defense News lists some of the other items that the Army is buying this year with its $27.8 billion procurement budget:
• $473 million to buy Patriot PAC-3 missiles.
• $596 million to buy 7,000 Humvees.
• $828 million to buy 2,862 trucks in the Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles.
• $483 million to buy trucks in the Family of Heavy Tactical Vehicles.
• $172 million to buy mortars rounds.
• $222 million to buy artillery rounds.
• $167 million to buy rockets.
• $132 million to buy combat service support equipment.
• $712 million to modernize AH-64 Apache helicopters.
• $705 million to buy UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
• $191 million to buy Chinook CH-47 cargo helicopters.
• $468 million to buy Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters to replace OH-58D Kiowa Warriors.
• $230 million to buy Light Utility Helicopters.
• $98 million to buy 5,900 M4 carbines.
“We are trying to procure M4s for all soldiers in theater; the shorter weapon gives a lot more potential,” the service’s budget director, Lt. Gen. Dave Melcher said.
UPDATE 7:44 PM: "The 4th Brigade was also scheduled to test Land Warrior at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., but now that has also been canceled," Federal Computer Week notes. "NTC is a common final stop for realistic training before Iraq deployments."
The unit will be fully supported throughout its Iraq deployment, Atherton said. The Army has funding for unit support and repair parts through 2007 and is confident they will find procurement or operating money to keep the unit alive in 2008.
Meanwhile, the program office for Land Warrior here at home will be shut down. The Army will buy replacement parts and materials to last during the duration of the deployment...
The Army is looking for alternatives to give dismounted soldiers a point of presence on the network, Melcher said. One possibility is something called the Single Infantry Transport System, which has similar capabilities, he said.
That's "too much information," for those of you over the age of fourteen. These days, information superiority is supposed to make U.S. military forces faster, smarter and more lethal and able to defeat more numerous foes on their own turf. But how much information can one soldier process, and how fast can he make decisions?
Unmanned vehicles sporting sophisticated sensors are key suppliers of new and more voluminous streams of info to grunts on the ground. But in addition to potentially overwhelming customers with too much information, robots require regular input from their human masters.
That's a key problem facing the engineers responsible for developing the Army's human-robot interfaces. At the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center in suburban Detroit, Gregory Hudas and his colleagues are trying to figure out what robots should be allowed to do on their own, and what they should ask permission for. The key factors are what human operators are comfortable with, and what they're capable of. "We must be aware of when they [soldiers] get overloaded."
To work out this problem, the folks at TARDEC have linked up two consoles representing the controls of a Future Combat Systems fighting vehicle. Each console boasts three tall touch-screen displays. At the center in front of a padded seat, there is a control stick similar to what you might see on an arcade game. The consoles include a simulation function, akin to a video game, that the TARDEC engineers use for tests.
On one screen, a TARDEC engineer representing an FCS crewman brings up an overhead map of the battlefield dotted with icons representing his vehicle and four robots that he's controlling. One is a Fire Scout aerial drone. The others are ground drones equipped with cameras and guns. On his other screens, the crewman can see what his robots are seeing in addition to what's outside his own vehicle. It's a massive amount of data for one man to process, and things are sure to get worse when he decides to send his drones on a reconnaissance mission, potentially forcing him to also coordinate the movements of five vehicles simultaneously while facing an elusive enemy on unfamiliar terrain.
Which is why the Army decided that each FCS vehicle would include two identical consoles. Side-by-side crewmen would share responsibility for all the functions described above. The Army believed that by coordinating their efforts, one two-man crew should be able to control 10 drones and keep up with all their data feeds.
But that's too many robots, Hudas says. Four drones is the realistic max. And a third crewman at an additional console is ideal. And that's assuming a minimal level of human intervention in the drones activities. Basically, you tell a drone what to do, confirm the command, then let it go. Now, if the drone wants to kill something, it's going to need a soldier's permission. But for surveillance and reconnaissance, it can make its own decisions. "With those applications," Hudas says, "we don't even want a soldier."
Thanks to TARDEC and other research organizations, the Army is making enormous strides in combining thinking men and thinking machines into one cohesive fighting force. That's the subject of a feature slated for our March issue. Stay tuned.
The other day, Inside Defense broke the news that the Army was shaving billions off of its massive modernization program, Future Combat Systems. Now, we're starting to get some details. Turns out the drones are the ones getting the axe.
FCS originally envisioned four types and sizes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, buzzing over soldiers' heads. The littlest ones would join platoons. Slightly bigger drones would be assigned to companies. Batallion commanders would supervise an even larger UAV. And the biggest of 'em all -- an armed, robotic helicopter -- would work for the brigade.
Those four classes of UAVs are now being trimmed down to two; just the tiniest and the most gargantuan drones will remain. There will still be other robotic planes in the Army's arsenal -- the hand-held Ravens, the Shadows, and the big, high-flying, bad-ass Warriors.
But the move is the latest in a series of efforts to scale down the once-grandiose FCS vision. First to go were the all-electric, laser-firing, next-gen fighting vehicles. Then, the requirement that those vehicles fit into a C-130 transport plane. And after that, the high-tech uniforms that were supposed to electronically tie the grunts to the larger Army. With the vehicles' designs still very much in flux -- and with the network connecting all of those drones and vehicles together still facing majorroadblocks -- who knows what will be left, when FCS finally deploys?
UPDATE 3:55 AM: Speaking of those little Raven drones, it looks like the Marines will start using 'em, too. Inside Defense says that the Corps has given up on its own mini-UAV, the Dragon Eye. During the Iraq invasion, Marines found the drone "too flimsy," and didn't stay in the air nearly long enough. Some fixes were made. But the things still had a nasty habit of "break[ing] apart upon repeated landings." So it's out with the Dragon Eyes. In with the sturdier Ravens.
Behind the Army's Cash Crunch
Our Army gets $168 billion a year to train and fight. So why do its chiefs keep complaining about a cash crunch? The Wall Street Journal's Greg Jaffe explains, in maybe the best article on the subject to date.
From 1990 to 2005, the military lavished money on billion-dollar destroyers, fighter jets and missile-defense systems. Defenders of such programs say the U.S. faces a broad array of threats and must be prepared for all of them. High-tech weaponry contributed to the swift toppling of the regimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but has been of little help in the more difficult task of stabilizing the two countries.
Of the $1.9 trillion the U.S. spent on weaponry in that period, adjusted for inflation, the Air Force received 36% and the Navy got 33%. The Army took in 16%, it says. Despite the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, both dominated by ground forces, the ratio hasn't changed significantly...
It may seem hard to believe that a country which allocated $168 billion to the Army this year -- more than twice the 2000 budget -- can't cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the two pillars of the Army, personnel and equipment -- both built to wage high-tech, firepower-intensive wars -- are under enormous stress:
The cost of basic equipment that soldiers carry into battle -- helmets, rifles, body armor -- has more than tripled to $25,000 from $7,000 in 1999.
The cost of a Humvee, with all the added armor, guns, electronic jammers and satellite-navigational systems, has grown seven-fold to about $225,000 a vehicle from $32,000 in 2001.
The cost of paying and training troops has grown 60% to about $120,000 per soldier, up from $75,000 in 2001. On the reserve side, such costs have doubled since 2001, to about $34,000 per soldier.
At Fort Knox, Ky., the cash crunch got so bad this summer that the Army ran out of money to pay janitors who clean the classrooms where captains are taught to be commanders. So the officers, who will soon be leading 100-soldier units, clean the office toilets themselves.
"The cost of the Army is being driven up by [Iraq and Afghanistan]. That's the fundamental story here," says Brig. Gen. Andrew Twomey, a senior official on the Army staff in the Pentagon. The increased costs are "not from some wild weapons system that is off in the future. These are costs associated with current demands."
Senior Army officials concede they mistakenly assumed prior to the Iraq war that if they built a force capable of winning big conventional battles, everything else -- from counterinsurgency to peacekeeping -- would be relatively easy. "We argued in those days that if we could do the top-end skills, we could do all of the other ones," says Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the deputy commander of the Army's Training and Doctrine Command. Iraq has proven that guerrilla fights demand different equipment and skills. "I have had to eat a little crow," says Gen. Metz...
The Humvee stands as a metaphor for the problems the Army faces. First fielded in the early 1980s, it was designed to ferry soldiers around behind the front lines of a conventional war. In recent years, the vehicle, which troops drive on the streets of Iraq, has been modified countless times. The Army has bolted layers of armor onto it to protect troops from roadside bombs. It has added sophisticated electronic jammers, rotating turrets, bigger machine guns, satellite navigational systems and better radios.
The result is a Humvee that is much better than the version the Army took to Iraq in 2003. But the add-ons have driven up its cost. The modified vehicle is top heavy and tends to tip over at high speeds. Army officials say they can't add more weight without overwhelming the engine or breaking the axle.
"The Army recognizes that the Humvee has reached a limit of our ability to improve it for the current fight," Gen. Speakes says.
What the Army says it really needs is an all-new vehicle, designed to better withstand roadside bombs that have become part of life in Iraq. But such a vehicle likely won't be ready until 2010 or 2012, Army officials say. In the interim, the Army wants to buy something on the commercial market -- South Africa, Turkey and Australia all make alternatives. Yet it's not clear whether the Army, which is struggling to equip the current force, has the money.
Army Axing High-Tech Uniforms, "Future"
The Army made a big decision, back in October. After 15 years and a half-billion dollars in development, the service would finally take Land Warrior, its ensemble of high-tech soldier gear, to war for the first time. The collection of radios, GPS-locators, and next-generation rifle scopes wasn't perfect -- far from it. But, for infantrymen who typically don't even have a walkie-talkie, it was an important first step towards plugging the average soldier into battlefield network.
But, just six weeks later, the Army appears to have reversed itself. According to Inside Defense, service financiers have decided to kill off Land Warrior in its 2008 budget. It's one of a number of high-tech programs slated for big cuts by the Army.
The service got $17 billion less than what it wanted for its 2008 budget from the Pentagon and the White House. "Earlier in October... Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker said if the service got less than what it needed in FY-08 it would be forced to slow the modernization of the force," Inside Defense's Dan Dupont notes. "In submitting its budget plan to Pentagon leaders last week, the Army contended that budget constraints have forced the service to take what it believes are imprudent risks in the readiness of today’s forces, as well as in its future plans."
Future Combat Systems -- the Army's plan to connect all its next-generation tanks, robots, and fighting vehicles to that battlefield network -- is also slated to take a good-sized hit.
By delaying key milestones, shifting some pieces of the program out of FCS plans and killing others, the Army believes it can save more than $3.3 billion over the next six budget years (fiscal years 2008 to 2013).
The moves would reduce the cost to field each FCS brigade combat team, but it would also push back procurement plans for BCT equipment, delaying by five years the schedule for fielding the teams, according to sources familiar with the plan.
The FCS cuts also entail the removal of some unmanned aerial vehicles from the program and the deferral of some vehicles, as well as some ammunition. The upshot of the moves would be an FCS program consisting of 14 platforms plus the network, down from the 18 envisioned today, with FCS systems to be fielded at a rate of one brigade combat team per year for fifteen years, beginning in 2015. Prior plans called for those 15 BCTs to be fielded at a rate of 1.5 per year over 10 years.
Now, just because the Army has proposed these cuts doesn't necessarily mean they are going to happen. As you may have heard, there's a new party taking over Congress. And, at least in the run-up to the elections, these guys made a lot of noise about giving the Army a boost. Then there's the new Secretary of Defense. He may be more favorably inclined to funding the Army than his predecessor was. Certainly, he seems to look kindly on the larger goal of retooling the military. Check of this exchange with Sen. Elizabeth Dole:
SEN. DOLE: Dr. Gates, the transformation efforts undertaken by Secretary Rumsfeld are critical to meeting the challenges of the 21st century. While Secretary Rumsfeld made transformation of the military a priority, obviously much remains to be done. In your view, which transformation programs are the most important and effective in fighting this war on terror?...
MR. GATES: Senator Dole, one of the things that has impressed me the most in the briefings -- the very short briefings that I've received preparatory to this hearing, is the extent of the transformation that actually has taken place in recent years, compared to when I was in government.
I can't tell you how many crisis meetings I sat through in the Situation Room over a 20-year period, and we would look at military contingencies, and we would be looking at 60 to 90 days to generate a brigade, to get a military force on the move and in place.
So the expeditionary nature of the Army, the mobility, the change in mind-set -- sometimes perhaps those of you who have been really close to it may not fully appreciate just how dramatically the situation already has changed, compared to when I was in government last.
I think that the transformation needs to continue... The two things that I think make a lot of sense has been this shift of the Army from being basically a static force to a more mobile expeditionary force. I think that's very important.
I think that the -- based on very superficial information at this point, this -- the shift from divisions to the brigade structure does make a lot of sense, and I think it provides a lot more flexibility.
I would say that one of the things that I think is very important in the transformation is continuing to strengthen our capacity to fight irregular wars. I think that's where the action is going -- is most likely to be for the foreseeable future. And so I think it's very important that it go forward.
Cash-Poor Army Pays Big to Pimp Pricey 'Future'
The Army is quickly going broke, its leaders insist. Worn-out gear can't be replaced; units can't properly prep for combat; some bases can't even afford to mow the lawn.
But there's one Army account that the generals are still managing to keep packed to the brim: marketing. The annual Association of the United States Army convention is going down this week, in Washington. And the Army is pulling out all the stops, to show just how groovy its $300 billion high-tech upgrade, Future Combat Systems, is going to be.
High above conferees' heads, a movie theater-sized screen shows Hollywood-grade videos of how awesomely FCS will work in action. Beneath the display, an Army major and a Boeing executive -- each equipped with wireless mics -- lecture a crowd, seated in stadium seats, about FCS' virtues. Beside them, to the right, is a mock operations center, manned by a trio of soldiers, pantomiming battle commands.
To the left, an defense contractor is demonstrating the new Future Combat video game. "Kaboom!" he shouts, as he directs some simulated next-gen cannon to waste a pixilated foe. Ostensibly, the game is supposed to start getting officers familiar with "the FCS wireless network-centric operating system that seamlessly links advanced communications and networking systems with soldiers, platforms, weapons, and sensors." But when I ask the contractor whether the game is really just a marketing tool for the mega-expensive project, he sighs, "Yeah."
Now, the FCS folks are hardly the only Army team with a booth at the conference. Everyone from Airborne to Special Forces to ROTC has a little set-up -- to market themselves within the Department, to show off to the higher-ups, and to prove their worth to Congress. And that makes some sense, in an organization as big and complex as the Army. But still, you've got to wonder whether it's the right thing to do -- with multiple wars raging and with budgets apparently so tight. "A real 'fleecing of America' story," says one conference-goer. "It's like 'we're going broke, and here's a super-slick presentation to show you why.'"
"Future Combat" Needs Info Chief
Talk about a thankless job. The Army is planning to spend $300 billion or more on a massive effort to make its forces quicker, lighter, and much better networked. The program, Future Combat Systems, has come under intense scrutiny -- and not just for its bloated budgets and constantly-shifting expectations. FCS is also an information technology undertaking for the ages, trying to link together countless thousands of next-gen tanks, flying drones, fighting vehicles, and robotic ground sensors all into a single "System of Systems Common Operating Environment."
If you've got a head hard enough to think you can pull this off, give the folks at defense contractor SAIC a ping. They're looking for deputy CIO for Future Combat Systems -- "minimum of 15 years experience in both classified and unclassified enterprise information management" required.
"Proficiency with Microsoft products and common office software applications" is a must, SAIC tells job-seekers. "Candidates must possess excellent oral and written communication skills with the ability to communicate difficult concepts to various audiences; and, have the ability to accomplish tasks under limited supervision."
Hmmm... $300 billion. Limited supervision. Maybe that job doesn't sound so bad, after all.
(Big ups: Sailfast)
Futures
Man, I wish Noah were around to comment on this one, from Inside the Army:
The Future Combat System successfully cleared its initial preliminary design review, marking the end of the program's "PowerPoint" phase and the beginning of more tangible progress, program officials said last week.
"We are done with PowerPoint charts," said Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, the Army's FCS program manager during an Aug. 15 conference call with reporters. "It's about building real stuff for not only the current force but to build the equipment for the future modular brigades."
And then there's this, from a congressional staff member:
Another area of concern is the program's long-term costs, but the discussion during the initial preliminary design review put aside the issue of cost entirely, the staffer said.
Noah may not be around, but you can get a pretty good idea of what he'd say by browsing here.
UPDATE, 5:06 EST (from Axe): Since Noah's not around, I'll say it: FCS is too expensive, too ambitious, technologically and operationally unsound and destined for the kinds of cuts and stretches that turn even useful programs into multi-billion-dollar embarassments. Only here we're talking a trillion dollars, if the Army FCS-izes the entire force.
In 2011, planned FCS costs would account for about 6 percent of the Army's $21 billion procurement budget, CBO estimates; by 2015, that share could rise to almost half and remain at or above 40 percent through 2025. (For purposes of comparison, in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Reagan defense buildup, the Army dedicated at most 20 percent of its procurement funds to buy combat vehicles.)
The latest Congressional Budget Office report (PDF!) on the Army's $250-billion Future Combat Systems family of vehicles paints a pretty bleak picture:
In 2011, planned FCS costs would account for about 6 percent of the Army's $21 billion procurement budget, CBO estimates; by 2015, that share could rise to almost half and remain at or above 40 percent through 2025. (For purposes of comparison, in the mid-1980s, at the height of the Reagan defense buildup, the Army dedicated at most 20 percent of its procurement funds to buy combat vehicles.
So CBO has come up with alternatives, as described by Defense News:
CBO’s first alternative, focused on the Army’s ability to collect and disseminate information, includes the purchase of unattended ground sensors, all four proposed classes of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and a computer network to link them all together ...
A second alternative, with an emphasis on long-range strikes, calls for the procurement of the network and ground sensors, but only the longer-range UAVs (Classes III and IV) to detect targets and an FCS vehicle-based mortar system to attack them ...
Under a third alternative, the Army would focus on maneuver warfare by developing several of the proposed FCS vehicles, particularly those that would replace aged M113 armored personnel carriers and M109 self-propelled howitzers. The FCS computer network would be retained ...
Under the fourth and least expensive alternative CBO proposed, the Army would develop only the computer network and forgo acquisition of any other FCS components. The service would maintain the same fleet of armored vehicles that it has had for more than 20 years ...
One aspect common to all four proposals is the elimination of the unmanned ground vehicles and “intelligent munitions” system now part of the FCS plan. All four alternatives would, however, see the Army upgrading its armored vehicles to the most recent standard, while incorporating various FCS attributes as they are developed.
The Army has already moved forward on such upgrades, as the CBO explains:
The more than 2,500 upgrades that the Army plans to procure from 2007 through 2016 would improve the capabilities of its tanks, fighting vehicles and personnel carriers and slightly lessen the increase in the average age of the armored vehicle fleet ... When combined with the additional upgrades funded in the supplemental appropriations enacted this past June, the planned upgrades would further the Army's efforts toward meeting its goal of having enough of the latest models of its Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles to equip all of its heavy brigades and prepositioned stocks.
But the Army says that upgraded legacy vehicles, while capable, would mean heavier brigades that are 25 percent slower to deploy using existing sealift and airlift assets.
Here's a thought: stick to proven, affordable armored vehicles that work (and might even be better suited to future fights than FCS) while investing some of the savings in more ships and C-17s, speeding up deployments at a fraction of the cost.
As gut-wrenching as today's Times story on runaway Pentagon spending is, the article doesn't touch on what's quickly becoming the biggest defense contracting boondoggle of them all.
Reporter Leslie Wayne pulls out some great factoids in her piece today.
For instance, contractors on the Joint Strike Fighter, a next-generation fighter jet, received their full bonus award of $494 million from 1999 to 2003, even though the program was $10 billion over budget and 11 months behind schedule.
Contractors in the F-22A fighter jet program, over the same time period, received 91 percent of their performance bonus, or $849 million, even though the current phase of the program was $10 billion over budget and two years late.
And a handy chart shows that the per-unit cost of the F-22 was 189 percent higher than originally expected.
But that same chart shows the Army's massive Future Combat Systems modernization program costing a mere $127 billion -- up a paltry 54 percent since it was introduced.
Which was true a couple of days ago.
Now, however, the Office of the Secretary of Defense has a new estimate: $300 billion, to revamp about a third of the Army's gear.
And remember, these costs are soaring in the earliest days of the program, before Future Combat's major hardware purchases are set. The new-fangled tanks, the family of ground robots, the fighting vehicle replacements -- in other words, the collective heart of the program -- are still enormous question marks. How much do you figure the price of FCS will go up, once those projects are set?
That's one of the reasons why Sen. John McCain -- one of Congress' few truly good guys on this issue -- has been pushing the Pentagon to adopt "fixed price" contracts for weapons R&D, instead of the insane "cost-plus" agreements, which give defense firms huge bonuses, even when their projects spin out of control.
But, of course, spinning projects out of control has become a contractor business strategy. Just look at what's happening with the F-22 and JSF. So the Lockheeds and Boeings of the world are fighting McCain's provisions, hard. If they win, how much do you think Future Combat will cost next year?
The Army still needs tanks
The transformation of the Army continues. It's just that part of the transformation involves keeping the M-1 Abrams main battle tank production lines open for an extra eight years. Operations in Iraq have affirmed heavy armor's worth, according to Army Times. (subscription only)
Fort KNOX, Ky. — The armor community is alive and well and the 70-ton Abrams tank has a bright future on the urban battlefield, even in a force moving increasingly toward lighter, more mobile fighting platforms, Army leaders said.
“Without tanks, we don’t have combined arms,” said Gen. B.B. Bell, commanding general of Eighth U.S. Army Korea, who spoke to a packed auditorium May 18 during this year’s Armor Warfighting Symposium about tank successes on the Iraq battlefield.
Bell emphasized the tank’s important role in a complicated fight, pointing to its decades-old lethality, ability to adapt to open terrain and urban settings, the survivability factor for crews, and the fact that a heavy-armor task force can be deployed in as little as 96 hours.
Bell points out that urban operations are nothing new for the Army, and that tanks are major part of our ability to be successful in the cities. Tanks led the way during the initial invasion and have been prominent weapons in nearly every major operation as well as important in the day-to-day mission.
Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Richard Cody pointed out that the Army was not really prepared for modern warfare before the 9/11 attacks in 2001. It was under-trained, under-equipped, and in a generally-poor state of maintenance. But war has changed that to a great extent, and the place of the tank in the new and improved US Army has been re-thought.
“The opportunity to invest came to fruition when we went to war,” [Col. Larry Hollingsworth, Heavy Brigade Combat Team project manager] said. “It became apparent to people that the risks you could assume with your force during a peacetime environment were very different from the risks you could assume during wartime.”
“If you’re not going to fight with tanks and Bradleys, you may not want to invest in them the same way as if you were going to have to roll them into Baghdad. I think that’s what our entire Army has seen,” Hollingsworth said.
Note the machine gun shield with ballistic glass in the pictured M1A1 (pic from DoD). This is a recent addition to the old warhorse which increases protection while maintaining vital sight lines for the man on the gun. Other improvements for the M1, collectively known as the TUSK program ("Tank Urban Survival Kit"), are in the pipeline to transform our tanks into even more lethal monsters on today's battlefields, also known quaintly as "cities". Many times "transformation" isn't revolutionary but instead incremental.
It's not been just tanks, either, that have had their worth re-evaluated lately. It's also been the B-52 bomber, the A-10 attack plane, the 7.62x51mm rifle round, the M79 "blooper" grenade launcher, and many other systems, most of which are considered "old school" and had been slated for retirement. Some had already been put out to pasture but rushed back into service when the need arose. Sometimes it is because new gee-whiz gadgets don't work as expected, and we could have worse problems than to learn that the systems we already have are the ones we need.
Last year, when Pentagon chiefs threatened to cut funds for the F-22 Raptor, the Air Force unleashed a massive PR campaign for the jet -- even flying the thing over the Super Bowl.
This year, it's the Army's Future Combat Systems modernization effort that could be on the chopping block. And, according to Inside Defense, "FCS supporters are taking it to the streets to make sure its program is defended... across the country, plying the time-honored trade of ensuring as many congressman in as many districts as possible are on board."
FCS contractors haven't made any playoff plans, yet. But they are holding a dozen conferences around the country to talk up the guargantuan, multi-faceted project.
The size of the program gives backers the opportunity to tap a large number of lawmakers for support: The FCS industry base spans 159 congressional districts over 35 states, with 363 companies on board, according to materials released by the program’s industry team.
And, apparently, those contractors are using some rather odd arguments to support the program. FCS centers, in large part, around replacing the Army's current fleet of tanks and fighting vehicles with lighter, quicker, better-networked substitutes. Which is all well and good, for fighting Iran or North Korea. Hurricane relief? That's a bit more questionable, at least to me. But not to FCS' industry team, which "has been advertising how well FCS could work in a 'Katrina-like' event," Catherine MacRae Hockmuth reports for Inside Defense.
Recon on Radio Project
Over the last year, we've spent a whole lot of time chronicling the woes of the Joint Tactical Radio System. That's the Pentagon's star-crossed $6.8 billion effort to replace their with just a few digital ones. It's the backbone of the military's effort to modernize itself. And it is not going well.
But "Jitters," as the program is Pentagonese, hasn't gotten much mainstream press attention -- largely, I think, because its sprawling and confusing, even for a Defense Department project. (Jitters has four "clusters" of radios, for example -- the last of which is "Cluster 5.")
The current issue of Defense Technology International (pgs 30-34) does the best job I've seen so far at picking through the Jitters tangle, detailing what's working, and what's holding the radio project back. Check it out.
Inside Defense reports that FCS is on a "short list of...weapon system programs that could be terminated or significantly pared back."
“They are looking to slip it to the right or kill it,” said a source familiar with FCS options advanced by the Pentagon's office of program analysis and evaluation.
Army officials are working to convince Pentagon leaders, including England, to reconsider cutting or even terminating FCS, the service's only major new-start development program.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker is scheduled to meet Friday with England and again make the case for the program, a briefing that is expected to discuss FCS' relevance to today's challenges.
Whoops! Make that $70 billion in cost overruns. The Defense Department quietly released a "selected acquisition report" this week saying that FCS would now run $161 billion -- up from 2003's $92 billion estimate. So we're talking a 75% increase. And remember, folks, that's only down payment. Because $161 billion only pays for modernizing a third of the Army's troops.
Curtains for "Jitters"?
The idea was simple: take the military's tangled mess of radios, any replace 'em all with a single, software-based model.
Essentially, the JTRS program [known as "Jitters"] is aiming for something that’s almost physically impossible, or at least extremely expensive, experts say... The desire to use a single antenna for many different wavelengths bumps up against laws of physics, which make it difficult to pull in strong signals across the spectrum. An amplifier that works across the whole spectrum will use much more electrical power than one tuned for a specific frequency band. Waveforms and transmissions that are speedily handled by analog systems, such as the widely used Link-16, are much tougher to achieve with digital computation...
A better solution... is using such software-defined radios only when absolutely needed. More and more communication of data and even voice can be routed via the Pentagon’s burgeoning digital network. Such relays could allow the new radios to coexist with older ones...
Initially, every JTRS box has to host all the waveforms and all the software for the network. To do so requires high-performance computer processors, which translates into more heat and power.
But for the JTRS radio to be carried on missiles to provide guidance and on other platforms such as unattended ground sensors, there is no requirement for all that processing power.
“So maybe one size does not fit all,” [Maj. Gen. Michael Mazzucchi, who commands the Army’s Communications-Electronics Lifecycle Management Command] said. “Maybe we can have it run just one wave form, then you wouldn’t have the same battery, heat and processing speed challenges.”
Mazzucchi said JTRS also ran into the reality of an ongoing war when the Army realized it needed a lot more tactical network radios and so ordered another 100,000 radios. “Those radios are going to last a long time, we’re not going to now go out and replace those radios in three years with JTRS.”
The Army is no longer looking at JTRS as a radio replacement program. Instead, it’s being viewed as a gateway into the network.
The article is "absolutely right," one Air Force radio specialist tells Defense Tech.
Yes, we'd all love a one-size-fits-all radio -- especially one which can tie into larger networks without a lot of mucking around with settings for an hour beforehand. But there are huge technical obstacles to be overcome in the meantime, and the Pentagon is being unrealistic about the timeline for deploying the system. (2 MHz to 2GHz? They're not kidding about laws of physics needing to be overcome.)
In the meantime, they could save a lot of trouble by procuring more of the newer do-it-all radios like the PSC-5D, PRC-117F, or the PRC-148. These radios already have impressive do-it-all capabilities and save a lot of hassle when it comes to interoperability.
Simply, the miltary has finally started using radios that can talk to different services, in different transmission modes, with different encryption, in addition to their normal mission. Our ETACS [Enlisted Terminal Attack Controllers, the guys who help bring in air support] used to need one radio to talk to the Army, a completely different one to talk to the planes, and yet another (different) radio to talk to the next echelon via SATCOM or HF. Each of these needs an encryption device (external, and bulky of course) plus associated power supply, audio cabling, and antennas…
Anyway, since the late 90's companies like Racal and Harris have been making radios which have multi-algorithm encryption built right into the radio, can handle lots of transmission modes (aside from the one or two a given service needs), and cover very broad frequency ranges. As an example, an old PRC-77 (the Army radio operators hauled around on their backs) covered 30-78MHz in FM voice mode only, with no internal encryption. (Mind you, that's just the Army; there's the USMC, USAF, USN, etc. to worry about, plus third parties.) A newer "do-it-all" radio like the PRC-148 MBITR covers 30 to 512 MHZ in AM, FM, SINCGARS (Army frequency hopping), HAVEQUICK II (Air Force frequency hopping) for both voice and data, with internal software that can simulate all sorts of external encryption devices.
AND the damn thing can talk through satellites.
This is typical of what similar radios like the PSC-5D and PRC-117 can do. The only real difference is form factor; the PRC-148 is the size of a largish walkie-talkie (slightly larger if you include the amplifier which makes SATCOM possible), the -5D and -117F are backpack-sized.
So now your ETAC doesn't need a Humvee full of radios and encryption devices; he can carry one radio to talk to anyone he wants. Or maybe two if he needs to talk to two people simultaneously.
...and don't forget that the software-based nature of these new radios means they can learn all sorts of unheard of tricks. For instance, the PSC-5 series of radios can pair up to make a repeater, or retransmit a SATCOM channel over an Army SINCGARS net (for instance) AND vice versa.
Well, to a radio guy, that's pure dynamite.
JTRS wants to take it further, but in my opinion they're trying to turn over two pages at once. There's simply no precedent for tactical radios which self-program to switch nets (the way that cellphones do when changing service areas) and it could take a decade - easily - to get this off the ground.
"Cheap, Ugly" = Good
The Army's Future Combat Systems overhaul is FUBAR, we all know. But it's just the latest in a long line of big-ticket Pentagon programs to burn cash and squander expectations.
So it there any way for the Defense Department to buy next-gen gear without picking taxpayers' pockets and leaving soldiers ass-out? Pentagon insider Dave has a few new rules on his blog, Garfield Ridge.
-- It has to be cheap...
-- Only one, maybe two, leap-ahead technologies allowed per program. The rest of the program has to rely on stuff we've already done before...
-- Congress must not care about it. If it hates it, it will cut it and ruin program stability, particularly in the early years where it's needed most. If it loves it, it'll add unneeded money and unrealistic demands on the program. The best programs are always the ones that Congress keeps their noses out of.
-- The program must be small enough to fail.
That last one is probably the most important one of all.
Most of the Pentagon's acquisition trouble in recent years has occurred on programs that are quite simply too big to fail. Either the requirement is one that can't be ignored, thus forcing the development program into a fixed schedule -- never a good idea to do this stuff on a deadline -- or the program reaches a point where so much money has been spent on it that in the event of failure no one wants to cut their losses and try something new. The moment the contractor smells fear on the part of the Pentagon, once it knows no one in the Building has the guts to cancel the program as it goes south, that's when the Pentagon takes it in the wazoo from industry, often willingly.
FCS, for all its necessary wisdom -- after all, it makes no sense to modernize the Army one little piece at a time -- FCS is precisely one of the complex systems that the Pentagon can't seem to run right anymore, if it ever could.
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.
FCS Jitters
The latest General Accounting Office study on the Army's massive modernization program finds - surprise - that there are 'development risks' involved in the the communications components. Since Future Combat Systems, or FCS, will network manned and unmanned vehicles and weapons, if the communications don't work, the system is a dud.
Fair enough. The larger problem is whether the constant demand for accounting and oversight that drives GAO and its congressional masters is making it harder for the US to maintain technological excellence in military space. To be risk-free, a program would need to depend on the technologies of the 1980s. The hard question is whether failure and waste are unavoidable companions when making better weapons or technical intelligence systems.
The answer to that question is yes, failure and waste are inevitable and maybe even necessary for real innovation. Corona, the original spy satellite, failed in its first five launches. The first 13 missions were failures and produced no pictures. The expense was enormous - if you adjust for inflation, the total program cost (over 12 years) may have been $40 billion. Of all Corona missions, only 70% were successful. But overall, Corona was an immense success. This sounds like an apology for waste, fraud and abuse, but it's actually a suggestion that it might be worth tilting the balance in how the US thinks about space back towards risk taking and away from accounting.
Weight watch
Back on June 13, Defense Tech readers were told of an Inside the Army exclusive -- a story revealing that the Army was set to announce its "design-to-weight" goal for the Future Combat System's Manned Ground Vehicles. Basically, that meant the Army had decided on the final weight for what was supposed to be a lean, mean battle replacement for tanks and other combat vehicles.
As Noah noted, that weight goal wound up a bit higher than originally expected: 24 tons vs. 19 tons, calling into question whether the thing could be transported via C-130 airlifter -- the Holy Grail of intratheater lift. (At 24 tons, it can't; at 19 tons, maybe, but it won't be fully outfitted -- multiple aircraft would be needed to transport the vehicles and additional equipment to be added once they're on the ground.)
The story was based on a draft Army press release that was pretty unequivocal:
On 31 May 2005, the Chief of Staff of the Army announced a decision directing the Program Manager, Unit of Action, to move forward with the 24Ton Design-To-Weight vehicle concept (24Ton). This significant decision provides the endorsement necessary to further posture the Manned Ground Vehicles (MGV) of the FCS program for continued success . . . [and] establishes the design envelope that will allow the platform design teams to move forward in systems engineering and development activities necessary to fully define required platform capabilities.
The word at the time was the Army was holding back on releasing the statement until the right people at the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill had been notified.
Well, not so fast. According to a story in this week's Inside the Army, the service now is saying it never decided anything.
Army Secretary Francis Harvey told reporters that a decision regarding manned ground vehicle weight had not been reached.
“We’re always re-evaluating the requirements. It’s a continuous process to re-evaluate the requirements and the mobility requirements,” he said. One key requirement is to be able to provide inter-theater transport on a C-130.
“So we’re looking [at] is that still a relevant requirement for FCS? We’ve made no decisions on that at all, but I think it’s always healthy to be looking at the relevancy of the requirement relative to the threat.”
What gives? The Army's not saying, acting like the announcement was never drafted. But with a defense budget battle on Capitol Hill, the service may not want any more controversy about weight and C-130 transportability right now.
That battle comes down to this: $400 million in cuts proposed by House lawmakers. Inside the Army has another story this week noting that some supporters feel the service hasn't exactly stormed Capitol Hill to fight the House reductions.
THERE'S MORE: Boeing, one of the two contractors steering the industry side of the FCS program, has a new CEO who says he likes challenges. He's got plenty.
Future Combat Systems will undergo its first major field test beginning in October:
Experiment 1.1 will run through calendar year '06, and will feature prototypes and "the first slice of the network," leading into the first spin off of FCS technologies into the current force, Dennis Muilenburg, Boeing FCS vice president-general manager/program manager, told reporters in a program update last week.
Boeing and Science Applications International Corp. are the Lead System Integrator for FCS.
Software and the network have been identified by various reports, including one done by the Institute for Defense Analyses, as areas that could become strategic risks without risk mitigation efforts that the LSI is undertaking.
The field experiment will "allow us to look at the network inside of the formation down to the soldier level, and begin to link sensors in a direct way to soldiers," Dan Zanini, SAIC senior vice president and FCS deputy program manager, said.
FCS is under fire from a lot of directions, as many of the various systems seem to be coming in overpriced, overweight, and under performance specs.
The October field exercise will follow a series of experiments in the system of systems integration lab that opened this year.
A series of stretched Humvees will be used as surrogate vehicles. "Those vehicles will be equipped with elements of the network, so they will include JTRS (Joint Tactical Radio System) radios," Muilenburg said. Other network elements will include early System of System Common Operating Environment (SOSCOE) software and early elements of battle command software.
FCS is closely tied to JTRS Cluster 1, led by a separate area of Boeing, and Cluster 5, managed by General Dynamics. Cluster 1 is being restructured after a series of problems and show cause letter.
Defense Tech has been watching the Joint Tactical Radio for some time. See articles here, here, and here.
The field exercise will also include early prototype hardware for the unattended ground sensors (UGV) and potentially an early prototype launch system for the intelligent munition system. iRobot's PackBot will also take part. Another potential participant is the largest FCS unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout. The smallest UAV, the Micro Air Vehicle, under development by Honeywell and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a candidate FCS program, is also expected to take part in the tests.
Critics, no doubt, will get good mileage out of the Humvee-based FCS vehicle stand-ins. While the FCS vehicles certainly have a long way to go, detractors would also do well to remember that the German army began practicing blitzkrieg tactics with cardboard tank cut-outs mounted on cars. And one FCS vehicle, the NLOS-C self-propelled artillery, is getting fast-tracked.
So, while problems abound, the FCS program rolls onward.
A reader at MO tipped me off to this beast. It's the NLOS-C (non-line-of-sight cannon) demonstrator, and it's fired over 1,000 rounds during testing near Yuma, AZ.
Regular Defense Tech readers will know that the FCS program is a plan with great potential but many questions and growing price tags. Not to mention swelling waistlines. Of all the FCS vehicles, though, this one seems to be the farthest along and on the right track. That's because the manufacturer, United Defense, already had a great deal of groundwork completed due to the canceled Crusader program:
United Defense designed and fielded NLOS-C CTD in just six months following Crusader program cancellation. CTD leverages Crusader technology, the M777 towed howitzer 39-caliber cannon, a fully automated ammunition handling system and a 20-ton highly mobile tracked platform. The current CTD has a magazine capable of holding 24 cannon projectiles and hybrid-electric (diesel electric) propulsion system providing fuel economy.
This particular beast seems to actually fit the concept of taking advantage of "off-the-shelf" components whenever possible that FCS was supposed to embrace. But it's a demonstrator and not the final product. However, a recent pile of money thrown in the general direction of FCS includes funds to accelerate the NLOS-C development.
There are a number of other big-gun artillery/fire support options out there, as well.
The Stryker Mobile Gun System (MGS) is still having trouble and won't be fielded until at least 2007.
The Stryker crowd can take heart that there's also a LAV III-based 105mm mobile howitzer prototype that's been tested and apparently performed well. It was developed on spec, though, and there's no spare change available at the moment.
The M8 AGS was originally developed for the airborne. The XVIII Airborne Corps has looked at the French-built Ceasar, a 155mm howitzer mounted on a 6x6 truck for some big-barreled punch.
Canada is planning to purchase the troubled Stryker MGS, but some up north wonder if there aren't better alternatives available.
Some of these are fire support platforms, some are more like traditional self-propelled artillery, and the M8 AGS is really more of a light tank.
But FCS has the money (for now, at least), so the NLOS-C has to be considered the odds-on favorite. Meanwhile, the troops in the field continue to wonder if the big guns will ever be providing some cover and knocking in bunkers for them.
THERE'S MORE: Of course, big guns aren't the only way to make big holes. Missiles and advanced guidance are changing the way artillery support works.
AND MORE: A commenter on my site noted that, for all the advanced gear and space-age weaponry, it will still all come down to the soldier. It's important that we don't lose sight of this. To underscore the importance of our men and women in uniform, I pointed out the pic on the front page of today's DefendAmerica.mil and wrote
There's probably very little on earth scarier than a US soldier or Marine with a map and a radio.
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.
But now, that's not going to happen, Inside Defense reports. The site has gotten a hold of a draft Army press release which announces that Future Combat System's Manned Ground Vehicles (MGVs) will weigh 24 tons, not 19.
The Army insists that the MGVs will still be able to be carried in a C-130, to "provide a wider range of crossable bridges; improve tactical mobility, enable the reduction of the logistics footprint; and facilitate greater strategic deployability." But it doesn't look like the vehicle will be "ready to fight when it lands," explains Inside Defense editor Dan Dupont. A bunch of material – including armor, perhaps – will have to be added, first.
The add-on process will only take 30 minutes, the Army insists. But given that the Army was promising 19-ton MGVs not too long ago, I'd take that claim with about 5 tons of salt.
Add the thinkers at the Congressional Research Service to the growing list of folks who think the Army's sprawling set of modernization programs, Future Combat Systems, is bad news.
As regular Defense Tech readers know, costs for the project have been swelling out of control -- from $92 billion to a possible $450 billion -- while major chunks of FCS has been pushed back.
Congress, in its authorization, appropriation, and oversight roles may wish to review the relevancy of the FCS program in terms of current and potential future threats, the overall viability of the program, program management and contractual agreements, and program “off ramps” into the current force should the FCS program be modified or curtailed.
Defense Tech readers will be not at all surprised to learn that the Joint Tactical Radio System ("Jitters") is one of the report's biggest Future Combat fears.
"JITTERS," BROKEN DOWN
The Army's massive modernization project, Future Combat Systems, isn't just one program. It's hundreds of interlocking, interwoven efforts to update armor, uniforms, logistics, medical care, and much, much more. A few key threads hold the whole tapestry together. And one of them is rapidly coming undone.
Without communications -- specifically, without the Joint Tactical Radio System, or "Jitters" -- many of FCS' most innovative efforts just won't work. FCS is an attempt to turn the Army into a force that takes out opponents with ultra-precise attacks and almost Godlike knowledge of the battlefield instead of with overwhelming firepower. To make this nimbly lethal dream come true, the Army needs almost-instant information-sharing, both between soldiers and with FCS' new fleet of robots. It needs Jitters.
Right now, the Army isn't getting what it needs. Jitters is flailing, badly. As we noted the other day, the Army has put one of the program's main contractors, Boeing, on notice that it could cancel one component, or "cluster," of Jitters in a month.
Winds of Change offers today some stellar background on the program -- what Jitters does, the problems it faces, and what might happen next. And it the site's comments section, a Jitters engineer weighs in on how the program got so tangled up. Good stuff.
THERE'S MORE: Meanwhile, Inside Defense reports, the Army is starting to look around for alternatives to Jitters.
The Army's next-gen set of rockets is called the Non-Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS). It's supposed to rely on Jitters' "Cluster Five" to direct its assaults. But, like Boeing's component of the radio system, Cluster Five "has hit its own program snags," says Inside Defense. As a result, the Army is considering the possible use of surrogate systems.
NLOS-LS is made up of three key components: the Precision Attack Munition, a direct-attack missile that can autonomously acquire a target; the Loitering Attack Munition, which is being designed to fly to a target up to 70 km away and loiter above it for up to 30 minutes before striking; and the Container Launch Unit, the box that stores, commands and fires the missiles.
The CLU, which officials call “the heart and soul of the program” because it contains the… information that… will tell the PAM where to go, depends on [Jitters].
“The number one risk to the NLOS-LS program currently is the network,” said Ric Magness, president of NetFires LLC, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Raytheon established to build NLOS-LS.
NLOS-LS is supposed to rely on a future software programmable radio called the Joint Tactical Radio System’s Cluster Five, but that program has hit its own program snags. As a result, the Army is considering the possible use of a surrogate for the PAM and the CLU.
According to a Government Accountability Office report, JTRS -- designed to transmit voice, video and data -- was put on a system development and demonstration path with immature technologies and few well-defined requirements. The program faces technical challenges because of its size, weight, power and data processing requirements. Its early development was delayed because of a contracting dispute.
“Consequently, the report said, "the Cluster 5 radios are not likely to be available" for the initial roll-out of FCS." And that includes the new rocket system.
AND MORE: Winds' sister site, Defense Industry Daily, is tracking the criminal investigation into the disfunctional search and rescue radios L-3 Communications has built for the Army.
COSTS M.I.A. FOR RADIO EFFORT
It's been nearly three years since Boeing won an Army contract to develop the next generation of military radios. But neither the company nor its government partners have any idea how many billions it's going to cost, in the end, to build the Joint Tactical Radio System -- "Jitters" for short. (I've seen estimates as low as $5 billion, and as high as $15 billion. That's a major spread.)
On Monday, the Army told Boeing in a letter than the mega-corporation had 30 days to give a good reason do to some 'splaining about why they let Jitters get so screwed up. The note also gave outsiders a peek into just how wrong Jitters has gone.
"It is impossible to predict with any confidence what the overall program will cost or the associated schedule," Defense Daily quotes the letter as saying. "Further, the government has not seen sufficient evidence of the contractor teams’ understanding of the scale of integration required for [Jitters' first phase] to ultimately achieve the program requirements. Nor has the industry team displayed sufficient ability to estimate a cost and schedule baseline and rigorously manage to that baseline."
As noted earlier, Jitters is not some minor experiment. It's a cornerstone to the Army's modernization plans. Without it, soldiers are stuck using a jury-rigged collection of radios to talk. Figuring out how much the damn things are going to cost seems like a most basic of first steps. Three years into the program, it shouldn't be that hard to take.
ARMY READY TO UNPLUG RADIO PROJECT
Boeing has a whole lot more to worry about today than its weak earnings this quarter. Another giant Boeing defense contract is in deep, deep trouble.
First, the company came under fire for its shady, $23.5 billion deal to lease tankers to the Air Force -- and fleece $5.6 billion from taxpayers. Then, projected costs for the its hulking Army modernization effort, Future Combat Systems, grew from $92 billion to a possible $450 billion (all while operating under some quirky purchasing rules that kept government auditors from getting too nosy).
The Army stopped work on the Joint Tactical Radio System ("Jitters") back in January -- partly because of technical screw-ups, partly because of trouble getting the National Security Agency to sign off on the encryption algorithms.
"The government is also concerned that the contractor won't be able to produce a radio that meets the Army's requirements for processing, heat dispersion, size, weight and power. In addition, the software remains immature, and the contractor lacks proper controls," Inside Defense says.
For all these reasons, Boeing now has 30 days to come up with a reason why the Army should not pull the plug on the Jitters contract.
If that happens, it won't just be a couple of Boeing execs who suffer the consequences. Soldiers today need a backpack full of radios to talk to their commanders and comrades. Jitters was supposed to be the way to reduce that load, and get a single communication system for G.I.s, marines, sailors, and airmen. But thanks to another blown defense contract, it looks like they're still going to be forced to carry that burden.
That didn't take long. Less than a month ago, Sen. John McCain started raising a stink about the Army's see-no-evil oversight of Future Combat Systems, its mammoth, $127 billion plus modernization project. Today, the Senator got what he wanted. Army Secretary Francis Harvey agreed to start treating the biggest technology development program in Army history like a real defense contract -- and less like the purchase of a couple of off-the-shelf PCs.
For reasons that remain unclear (but sure smell fishy) the Army made a deal with FCS' lead contractors, Boeing and SAIC, under Federal Acquisition Regulation 12. That rule lets the government buy everyday items, like commercially-available software, without having to fill out a pile of forms.
But it also means that contractors "are relieved of the obligation to [give] cost and purchasing data to military auditors," McCain told Harvey at a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing last March. In a program as massive as FCS -- and as crucial to the Army's next generation -- that kind of oversight can't be optional, McCain said.
"Now, Harvey and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker will review the program at least three times each year," Inside Defense says. And the FCS contract will be renegotiated under more standard terms, which will include items like "the Truth in Negotiation Act; the Procurement Integrity Act; Cost Accountability Standards; and an organizational conflicts-of-interest clause. These regulations were not part of the current agreement," according to the Seattle Times.
Hopefully, now that Harvey's giving himself the power to supervise FCS like it should, he'll take the opportunity to ask Boeing and SAIC execs a question or two about the program's skyrocketing costs, missed deadlines, and shifting priorities.
Since the bill for FCS has grown from $92 billion to a possible $450 billion in less than a year, those incentives should probably a brick. Or a couple of two-by-fours.
THE TIMES TAKES ON "FUTURE COMBAT"
Ever since it was just a wee little $92 billion program, Defense Tech has been ranting about the spiraling costs and doe-eyed expectations behind Future Combat Systems, the Army's gargantuan modernization plan. Now that the project -- meant to almost reinvent just about every aspect of warfighting, almost simultaneously -- is moving north of $145 billion, the New York Times is finally starting to take notice.
The Army's plan to transform itself into a futuristic high-technology force has become so expensive that some of the military's strongest supporters in Congress are questioning the program's costs and complexity.
Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion [click here for details]. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the "technological bridge to the future" would equip 15 brigades of roughly 3,000 soldiers, or about one-third of the force the Army plans to field...
That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not include a projected $25 billion for the communications network needed to connect the future forces. Nor does it fully account for Army plans to provide Future Combat weapons and technologies to forces beyond those first 15 brigades.
Now some of the military's advocates in Congress are asking how to pay the bill.
"We're dealing today with a train wreck," Representative Curt Weldon, Republican of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said at a March 16 Congressional hearing on the cost and complexity of Future Combat Systems.
"We're left with impossible decisions," said Mr. Weldon, a strong supporter of Pentagon spending. One of those choices, he warned, might cut back Future Combat.
THERE'S MORE: "But there's another, more serious issue, which the Times' otherwise excellent story doesn't explore," says Slate's Fred Kaplan. "Even if all the technical problems could be solved and the costs brought under control, the Army may be tumbling down the wrong road; Future Combat Systems may not address the true nature and needs of future combat."
AND MORE: Project on Government Oversight piles on, too.
$127 BILLION DOWN PAYMENT
$127 billion? That's just an ante. A down payment in the biggest, most expensive modernization program in the Army's history: Future Combat Systems, or FCS.
FCS -- the Army's plan to completely overhaul its forces, turning troops into a robot-reliant, network-heavy bunch -- has been slated to cost anywhere from $90 to $127 billion, according to the military.
But on Wednesday, Government Accountability Office eyeshade Paul Francis told the Senate Armed Services Committee said those cost estimates were misleading, at best. The first part of FCS, Francis noted, the one that weighs in at $108 billion, would only cover a third of the Army's troops. How much would it cost to upgrade the rest? Well, given the project's history of delays, switchbacks, poor management, and limp government oversight -- that's anyone's guess, Francis said in his prepared testimony.
Nearly 2 years after program launch and about $4.6 billion invested to date, requirements are not firm and only 1 of over 50 technologies are mature — activities that should have been done before the start of system development and demonstration. If everything goes as planned, the program will attain the level of knowledge in 2008 that it should have had before it started in 2003. But things are not going as planned. Progress in critical areas, such as the network, software, and requirements has been slower than planned. Proceeding with such low levels of knowledge makes it likely that FCS will encounter problems late in development, when they are costly to correct. The relatively immature state of program knowledge at this point provides an insufficient basis for making a good cost estimate.
$127 BILLION -- "OFF-THE-SHELF"
The $127 billion Future Combat Systems is the biggest, most expensive modernization program in the history of the U.S. Army. So why are its components being bought like thousand-dollar PCs?
That's what Sen. John McCain would like to know. As Inside Defense notes, under Defense Department rules -- specifically, Federal Acquisition Regulation 12 -- everyday, "off-the-shelf" items can be bought with a minimum of paperwork and oversight. Filling out endless forms just to buy new copies of Microsoft Word doesn't make much sense, after all.
But neither does applying FAR 12 to Future Combat Systems, or FCS, a program which encompasses everything from fleets of new robotic vehicles to a whole new architecture for battlefield communications to new uniforms for the troops.
"The FCS system is being included in the fiscal '06 budget as a commercial off-the-shelf item. That means that they are relieved of the obligation to [give] cost and purchasing data to military auditors," Sen. McCain told Army Secretary Francis Harvey during a March 3 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. "Tell me, Mr. Secretary, where might I be able to purchase such a vehicle commercially?"
"It's not -- it's certainly not off the shelf," Harvey replied. "Senator, you know that. It's a very heavy technology development program."
"I really think we’re going to have to change this designation," answered McCain, who's already planning on holding hearings on FCS.
Good idea. The FCS program has already been rejiggered, its costs have inflated, its deadlines have pushed back. And, oh yeah, one of the companies in charge of the program, Boeing, is hemorrhaging top executives because of ethical lapses. Maybe it made some kind of sense, at one point, to apply off-the-shelf rules to FCS, in an attempt to get the lumbering program going. But now, this project needs more oversight, not less.
JITTERS FOR RADIO PROJECT
During the early days of the Iraq invasion, some Marines were forced to use as many as seven different radios to communicate with colleagues and superiors. That's why the Defense Department has been working so feverishly on "Jitters," or JTRS, the $5 billion Joint Tactical Radio System effort to replace 750,000 old-school radios with software-based models.
Encryption problems and an array of other technical shortcomings are throwing the entire project into question, said industry sources...
The JTRS version known as “cluster 1,” intended for use aboard Army helicopters and ground vehicles, is scheduled for a major Defense Department review this summer.
An Army technical review, known as “early operational assessment,” is slated for April. In January, however, the Army ordered the contractors to halt JTRS-related work for at least six weeks.
“Technical challenges were encountered during development and integration that indicated the need for upgrades in performance and modifications in design,” said Timothy Rider, spokesman for the Army Communications and Electronics Command.
This marks a sharp reversal of fortune for JTRS, which was hailed by Pentagon officials in 2002 as a “transformational” program that would underpin the Defense Department’s vision of an interconnected “network-centric” military force...
The Army declined to elaborate on what exactly the technical issues are that potentially could derail this program. Industry sources contacted by National Defense indicated that one key area of concern is the encryption technology, which is overseen by the National Security Agency. Changes in the JTRS “security architecture” requested by the NSA potentially could delay the deliveries of JTRS cluster 1 by two years. Unlike previous generations of military radios, JTRS is entirely software-based, making the system more susceptible to hacking and prompting NSA to tighten the encryption requirements.
THERE'S MORE: NSA concerns aren't the only reason Jitters is being delayed, Inside Defense notes.
The system’s processing and memory capacity included no room for growth. Studies showed that the limit of the system’s random access memory was likely to be exceeded and would lead to “possible erratic performance that would be difficult to isolate,” said Tim Rider, a spokesman for the Army's the Communications-Electronics Life Cycle Management Command.
As a result, program officials determined that moving from the prototype’s early limited functionality to the final design “would not be possible,” Rider said...
Program officials realized the challenges would lead to cost increases by October 2004, Rider wrote in response to questions. There were three key signs. First, Boeing needed more resources to finish hardware and non-waveform software requirements that would address memory shortfalls. Next, new baseline requirements emerged. Also, evolving operational scenarios and the development of the Defense Department’s Global Information Grid expanded the understanding of a networked system of systems, which has driven upgrades to the radio system architecture that are needed to comply with National Security Agency standards...
In January 2004, the program received a reserve fund of $159 million for potential financial risks that were known to exist before the contract award. Boeing and the Army program office are preparing a plan and cost estimate for any additional cost increases and cannot provide specific figures until that process is complete, Rider said.
"FUTURE COMBAT" GETS FUNDS
If there was one part of the Pentagon budget that looked for sure like fat, waiting to be cut, it was the Army's $127 billion Future Combat Systems program, or FCS.
In December, the Pentagon recommended cutting $1.5 billion a year from the hulking modernization effort. Congress called the program -- which revamps almost every element of soldiers' lives, from the guns they carry, to the officers they salute, to the armored vehicles they drive -- beyond unrealistic. Outside observers saw in FCS a disaster waiting to happen.
Nevetheless, FCS hasn't just escaped the axe in this year's Pentagon budget -- it's grown, from $2.8 to $3.6 billion, Defense Daily notes. The Defense Department has requested $231.6 million for the Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System, a set of guided artillery shells and loitering mini-missiles being developed as part of FCS. The Pentagon wants to put another $107.6 million into the Non-Line of Sight Cannon, a 20-ton, 155mm, tracked cannon that can blast targets up to 30 kilometers away.
The Army is also adding $35 billion over 7 years to restructure its forces into smaler, more mobile units -- a key component of the FCS effort, which sees soldiers fighting in smaller, more mobile groups. And the Stryker light armored vehicles, a FCS precursor, is slated for $905.1 million this year to pay 240 more of the personnel carriers. So much for trimming the fat.
THERE'S MORE: The Defense Department may have promised billions in budget rollbacks last month. But now, Defense News notes, "even the Pentagon admits it: the 2006 budget calls for 'a healthy increase,' not a deep cut in defense spending.
At $439.3 billion, the 2006 spending plan would give the military $18.7 billion more than it has for 2005. The Defense Department would get a 4.8 percent increase while other federal agencies are being held to less than 2.2 percent...
And there will be more to come — perhaps $100 billion more — in the form of emergency supplemental appropriations to pay war costs.
The 2006 budget Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is sending to Congress Feb. 7 "continues our strong growth," a senior Pentagon official said. It pushes defense spending up 41 percent since President George W. Bush took office.
Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the most complex, most expensive upgrade the American military as ever tried. It calls for the rebooting of almost every component of Army hardware, from armored vehicles to software-based radios to flying drones to the uniforms G.I.s wear. And Boeing -- which got into hot water over its, um, peculiar arrangement with the Air Force for leasing tankers -- is one of two companies overseeing the sprawling effort.
Since FCS began in the late 90's, the project's technologies has been rejiggered, its deadlines have been shifted, and its goals have been reshaped.
Next month, "Mr. McCain, a senior member of the Senate armed services committee, intends to look at the vast FCS program as part of a series of hearings on Pentagon procurement practices," the Financial Times reports. "Mr. McCain was concerned about the structure of the deal, in which the army has essentially outsourced management of the contract to Boeing, in addition to cost overruns... He is also expected to ask the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the oversight arm of Congress, to look into FCS."
The GAO tore into the program and its managers this past April for lunging ahead with FCS, even when they knew its deadlines and technologies weren't at all realistic. What'll happen next, under McCain's direction, is anyone's guess. But I'm betting that there are a whole heap of problems just waiting to be uncovered here.
THERE'S MORE: "I first requested documents regarding the [tanker lease] proposal in June 2003. Regrettably, since then the DoD’s production of documents has been riddled by disruption, obfuscation and delay," McCain wrote in a letter to Defense Secretary on Saturday. "Some documents that were produced were doctored; others that should have been produced, were improperly withheld. To date, after months of assurances, partial production on only about 7 out of 36 request categories have been produced."
AND MORE: FCS is "a huge program, and obviously we need to have a hearing on it. I have no preconceived notions about it," McCain told Inside the Army today after a Senate policy luncheon. "I'm not against it. I'm not for it. I'm not trying to do anything other than exercise our legitimate oversight of the program."
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) told Inside the Army he supported the idea of a hearing on FCS -- if only to help senators help the Army balance its budget, a task complicated by mounting bills from the war in Iraq and other operations. Hearings could help lawmakers evaluate whether certain technologies could be accelerated even more to help soldiers fight the war in Iraq, Sessions said.
“The new FCS right now, we need more [unmanned aerial vehicles] which are part of the Future Combat System, but we need them now in Iraq. So you might take some of the money from some of the things that are not critical to today and say we're going to accelerate this part of the Future Combat System, which might sort of be contradictory to the plan we had prior to 9-11 FCS development,” Sessions said. But, he added, “some of the other things may slip on the timetable.”
ARMY SHIELDING "FUTURE COMBAT"
There's been a lot of noise in recent weeks about the fighter planes and aircraft carriers the Pentagon may or may not be cutting. But lost in the clamour is a simple, and strange, fact: one of the programs considered most likely to be pruned back has somehow avoided the budget axe. And now, Defense News reports, the Army is moving to "build a fence" around its gargantuan, $127 billion modernization program, Future Combat Systems, so it doesn't get cut in the upcoming tussle over Defense Department funding.
Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is a sprawling effort by the Army to turn itself Army into a quicker, better-networked, robot-reliant force. Since it was introduced back in the Clinton years, FCS has been reconfigured more than once, with deadlines pushed back and funding scraped away.
"In December, the Office of the Secretary of Defense recommended cutting $1.5 billion from the FCS program each year from 2006 to 2011," Defense News' Megan Scully notes. But instead of trimming that money, "typically considered the low-hanging fruit in the Pentagon budget," the Army is looking to make up the shortfall "largely by cutting civilian personnel."
"To significantly cut its payroll," the magazine says, "the Army may have little choice but to fill less than half of the slots it creates when it converts military posts to civilian positions, and may only be able to replace half of the civilians who retire."
The Army will also try to save FCS by relying on supplemental funding bills, meant to pay for the war in Iraq. The Army could get more than $66 billion from such a measure when it passes Congress -- which it almost certainly will, since no Senator or Represenative wants to be seen as keeping soldiers in the field from getting the gear they need.
"Some officials and military analysts said they are wary of the supplemental funding bills because they are not guaranteed annually," Defense News observes. "Still, the Army’s future plans hinge on having Congress authorize supplemental money for years to come."
Of the $3 billion or so allocated to FCS this year, "about $886 million would be used to buy tactical radios," the news service says. The Stryker armored vehicles -- a brigade of which just got done with a year-long deployment in northern Iraq -- "would receive an extra $672 million. The Army wants to spend $579 million on training ammunition."
Another $9 billion in FCS funds for future years has been moved around, too. Bloomberg notes that "the biggest portion of the shifted Future Combat Systems money, about $1.3 billion, will be allocated through 2011 for 'tactical vehicles,' including upgrades and repairs of General Dynamics M1A2 tanks and United Defense Industries Inc.'s Bradley Fighting Vehicles damaged in Iraq."
Back in 1999, when the Army launched Future Combat Systems, its $117 billion modernization program, "discussions were dominated by visions of an all-electric, laser-firing fleet of fast-moving tank-like vehicles unburdened by the weight of conventional armor," notes National Defense.
"Five years later, reality has set in," the magazine sighs. "Industry experts consider it doubtful, however, that the FCS will bring, in the near term, major breakthroughs in power generation, weapon lethality or survivability.
Fuel-efficient technologies, such as hybrid engines, have improved, but they only will reduce fuel consumption by moderate amounts, experts said. FCS units, like today’s brigades, will require a substantial logistics re-supply tail of fuel and ammunition...
On the weaponry side, the mainstay of FCS will be cannons and missiles. These weapons will be more sophisticated than current systems, but not a major departure. Non-kinetic technologies, such as lasers and high-powered microwaves, are progressing, but are not expected to be ready for operational use for many years...
For survivability, it remains unclear what technologies FCS will employ. Conventional passive armor is out of the question if the Army wants to keep the weight of the vehicles at less than 20 tons. “We haven’t found magic armor,” the program official said. The most promising technologies so far are electromagnetic armor and active protection systems, which sense and defeat incoming rockets or missiles by deflecting or intercepting them... [But], according to several sources, there is a strong cultural bias in the U.S. Army against installing active defenses on vehicles, because they are perceived as unsafe...
The Army’s top acquisition official, Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Yakovac, acknowledged that much uncertainty remains as to whether FCS can deliver what it promises.
“I’m not clairvoyant,” he told reporters. “As we look at the technology, it may or may not mature at the rate we need.”
The current program is only a reflection of “the best guess today...”
Nevertheless, the Army has made a major financial commitment to FCS, increasing its overall estimated cost from $90 billion to about $115 billion, which will cover the entire 17 systems and a command-and-control network, to be fielded to possibly 43 brigades by 2025.
"FUTURE COMBAT" GETS REAL
Future Combat Systems -- the U.S. Army's $117 billion plan to turn entire divisions into networked, robot-reliant forces in one fell swoop -- is over as we know it. In its place: a seemingly more sensible plan, to gradually improve units' speed, smarts, and connection to one another.
The program is still called Future Combat Systems, or FCS. But instead of trying to completely reboot Army forces by 2012, the goal is to introduce more modest -- but still substantial -- improvements, starting in 2008. Only after these building-block changes are made will the sweeping overhaul kick in.
The SOSCOE will run on Linux. Instead of the endlessly-overlapping, proprietary networks the military uses so often today, "it’s an open-source system and will have many of the off-the-shelf capabilities that are there or being developed in the commercial world," said retired Lt. Gen. Dan Zanini, who now works for Science Applications International Corp., one of two companies in charge of FCS development.
Also in development are the Joint Tactical Radio System and the Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, which will "provide the communications backbone of FCS," Government Computer News says. JTRS is a hand-held, software-based radio, which allows troops of every type to communicate with one another. Today, soldiers and marines can still be saddled on the battlefield with a half-dozen different radios. WIN-T is the mobile, wireless network for front-line troops.
Each project is, by itself, a titanic, multi-billion dollar Gordian Knot of a task. But by tackling these three first, there's a chance that the larger FCS program will actually succeed in the end.
"FUTURE" ARMY WRONG FOR URBAN FIGHTS
The U.S. Army is betting $92 billion that the wars of the future should be fought with smaller, lighter, more manueverable vehicles. But some military officials and defense contractor executives are saying that that these technology-laden Future Combat Systems (FCS) are too weak to withstand urban conflicts, like the one currently playing out in Iraq.
Like the Humvees of today, which are being shredded by rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs, the FCS vehicles won't have enough armor to withstand heavy assaults, critics tell Jane's Defence Weekly. And that could expose troops to greater danger.
Tanks, for instance, will be outfitted with a suite of new sensors, and will be plugged into a wireless network for combat. But they'll shrink to less than half their current size and loose some of their armor.
"The network is not going to keep you alive [and] is probably irrelevant once you make close contact with the enemy. Iraqis have turned out to be sufficiently smart . . . and change in order to inflict damage on us," an army official told Jane's...
Army officials and analysts told Jane's Defence Weekly that within the army, Congress and the two prime contractors for FCS (Boeing and Science Applications International Corp) optimism is waning. "I think large numbers of Democrats and Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee are acutely sensitive to all of this, understand it very clearly and are trying to figure out what to do," an army official said, adding "if the people from Boeing who work on this talk to you honestly, they tried to tell people in the army from the very beginning that this will not work."
Unlike the US plans, many non-US forces intend to continue to employ heavy armoured vehicles. The Israel Defence Force has experienced years of Iraq-like urban combat and highly values its range of heavily armoured personnel carriers developed from main battle tank chassis. The German Army also emphasises armour and its new Puma infantry fighting vehicle, scheduled to enter service in 2006, will have three different levels of armour protection, increasing the Puma's weight from 31.45 to 43 tonnes.
The Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) project was supposed to replace the lumbering, heavily armored tanks and personnel carriers of the Cold War with lighter, more maneuverable vehicles. Now, the M1 tank and Bradley fighting vehicles will be around for more than two decades, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker tells Defense News.
"The current force we have today, the heavy force, for instance, is still going to be in this Army out to 2030 — M1 tanks, Bradleys and all the rest of them," Schoomaker said. "The FCS, as we design that, we know the kinds of capabilities that we want resident in that force out there in the future. And the challenge is to balance that future with the current readiness that’s required to perform.”
Meanwhile, the 19-ton Stryker armored vehicle, designed as a bridge to ultimate transformation goals and now deployed to Iraq, has shed its “interim” moniker and is critical to the current force and to the development of FCS, Schoomaker said.
"It’s a near inevitability that the Army of tomorrow is going to be largely equipped with the technology of today," said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a Washington think tank. "The service is short on money and it is also short on vision in terms of what it is replacing existing equipment with."
Senior program officials from the Boeing and SAIC-led lead system integrator industry team met last week in Phoenix for a semi-annual "state of the union" meeting on FCS, said a program spokeswoman.
But a top item on that meeting’s agenda was "damage control," with the goal of shielding FCS from program delays and budget cuts, according to a source. (emphasis mine)
THERE'S MORE: It gets worse. Consulting firm CommerceBasix got "the cold shoulder from Army acquisition officials for doing exactly what it was hired to do — provide critical due-diligence analysis of the Army’s $14.8 billion contract with Boeing to develop the net-centric Future Combat Systems," Eric Miller writes in a Defense News op-ed.
REPORT: ARMY "FUTURE COMBAT" IN PERIL, GENERALS KNEW ALL ALONG
It's been called the most ambitious military effort since the Manhattan Project, and the centerpiece of Donald Rumsfeld's plans to overhaul America's armed forces: a $92 billion push to change almost everything about the Army by 2010, from the guns GIs carry, to the officers they salute, to the tanks they drive.
"Army officials acknowledge that (2010) is an ambitious date and that the program was not really ready for system development and demonstration when it was approved. However, the officials believe it was necessary to create 'irreversible momentum' for the program," reads the report from the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigational arm. "FCS is at significant risk for not delivering required capability within budgeted resources."
The Army and Boeing, one of Future Combat Systems' two main contractors, both say the sprawling project is on track. The congressional report is off-base, they assert.
"We have a good plan in place to address the concerns over technology maturity," said one Army source close to the project. Congress was "fully briefed up front" about the risks and pace of FCS' development.
But outside military analysts and former Pentagon officials are inclined to agree with the GAO's take on the Army effort. And they see it as the latest case of the military pouring countless billions into weapons systems before they're ready to go.
"For years, the GAO has been trying to explain in kindergarten-simple terms to the Pentagon that you should make something and test it before you buy it. But year after year, the process goes on. And the situation is getting worse," said Marcus Corbin, with the Center for Defense Information.
THERE'S MORE: FCS' delay "probably does not matter since the US military is so far ahead of the rest of the world that will we will win under any circumstances," notes GlobalSecurity.org's John Pike. But "it matters in the sense that the poor old long suffering taxpayers are getting taken to the cleaners again."
The missile defense system is probably the best-known of these bloated programs. But "these are not just missile defense mistakes," Pike notes. "They are systemic to any number of major defense and space programs of the past decade, all of which were awarded under conditions of intense competition, and all of which promised unrealistic costs saving due to using a single company as a systems integrator."
Referring to two recently-cancelled, high-profile Army programs, Project on Government Oversight's Eric Miller e-mails, "If you think the Comanche helicopter and Crusader Armored Vehicle programs were financial and technical disasters, wait until you see the Future Combat System program play out in future years. It’s hardly going out on a limb to say FCS is going to end up costing more than predicted, and as a result we’ll likely get fewer numbers of weapons systems and dumb down technologies."
Mentioning the Army's controversial new fleet of light armored vehicles, the Brookings Institution's Mike O'Hanlon asks, "We are already building a half dozen Stryker brigades -- why not get some use out of them before rushing to the next thing, and learn a bit from them? Also, the Abrams/Bradley heavy Army is still performing well and its equipment is not yet showing major signs of disrepair or obsolescence."
"I can't think in the 23 years I've sat here of a system more fraught with risk," Rep. John Spratt, (D-SC) recently told Army Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac.
In recent months, the sprawling, ambitious FCS program -- meant to equip a third of the Army's 70 combat brigades with a family of new networked vehicles at a cost of around $300 billion -- has taken a couple big hits. Several of the program's airborne and 
Robot Economist is 
FCS originally envisioned four types and sizes of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, buzzing over soldiers' heads. The 
But, just six weeks later, the Army appears to have reversed itself. According to 
But there's one Army account that the generals are still managing to keep packed to the brim: marketing. The annual Association of the United States Army 
Talk about a thankless job. The Army is planning to spend $300 billion or more on a massive effort to make its forces quicker, lighter, and much better networked. The program, Future Combat Systems, has come under intense scrutiny -- and not just for its 
Reporter Leslie Wayne pulls out some great factoids in her piece today.
This year, it's the Army's 
But "Jitters," as the program is Pentagonese, hasn't gotten much mainstream press attention -- largely, I think, because its sprawling and confusing, even for a Defense Department project. (Jitters has four "clusters" of radios, for example -- the last of which is "
Essentially, the 
So it there any way for the Defense Department to buy next-gen gear without picking taxpayers' pockets and leaving soldiers ass-out? Pentagon insider Dave has a few 
The latest 
As Noah noted, that weight goal wound up a bit higher than originally expected: 24 tons vs. 19 tons, calling into question whether the thing could be transported via C-130 airlifter -- the Holy Grail of intratheater lift. (At 24 tons, it can't; at 19 tons, maybe, but it won't be fully outfitted -- multiple aircraft would be needed to transport the vehicles and additional equipment to be added once they're on the ground.)
Future Combat Systems will undergo its first major field test beginning in October:
AND MORE: A commenter on 
The first step: slim down the service's cannon and armored vehicles. Today, it takes a gargantuan 
The Army's massive modernization project, 
It's been nearly 
First, the company came under fire for its 
The Army's plan to transform itself into a futuristic high-technology force has become so expensive that some of the military's strongest supporters in Congress are questioning the program's costs and complexity.
That's what Sen. John McCain would like to know. As 
Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the most complex, most expensive upgrade the American military as ever tried. It calls for the rebooting of almost every component of Army hardware, from armored vehicles to software-based radios to flying drones to the uniforms G.I.s wear. And Boeing -- which got into hot water over its, um, peculiar arrangement with the Air Force for leasing tankers -- is one of two companies overseeing the sprawling effort.
The missile defense system is probably the best-known of these bloated programs. But "these are not just missile defense mistakes," Pike notes. "They are systemic to any number of major defense and space programs of the past decade, all of which were awarded under conditions of intense competition, and all of which promised unrealistic costs saving due to using a single company as a systems integrator."
