A contentious bout of budget drills on Capitol Hill this year featured the Army’s top brass mounting a passionate defense of its prized Future Combat Systems.
For the fourth year in a row, Congress has targeted the FCS budget, which many lawmakers view as a convenient pot of money to be dipped into when other projects, viewed as more urgent, are in need of funds.
It remains to be seen whether the Army can reverse a proposed 25 percent cut to its 2008 budget request of $3.7 billion for Future Combat Systems. What seems clear is that the Army’s struggle to save its centerpiece weapon modernization program -- estimated to cost at least $160 billion over the next decade -- underscores a larger conundrum about how the Army sees its future.
The primal question that is emerging from the FCS budget dispute is whether the Army should continue to stick with an expensive program that reflects a vision of the future that has been overtaken by events.
The Future Combat Systems that the Army conceived in the late 1990s was intended to replace a heavy, slow moving force with lighter, speedier combat vehicles and robots, all linked by a high-tech computer network. At the time, the Army was seeking to overcome an embarrassing performance in the Balkans, where its attack helicopters and ground vehicles got bogged down by logistics problems and were unable to engage in combat on short notice.
FCS was the ticket to an agile Army that could rapidly land on a hotspot, easily confront and defeat an armored force, and head home.
Army officials, to be sure, have posited that the Future Combat Systems was designed for a “full spectrum” of operations, and is not necessarily optimized for conventional force-on-force fights.
But it may be too late to sell FCS to a skeptical Congress that does not see how all this new technology could help win in Iraq. The transformation of the Army towards an FCS-based force, experts contend, is misguided for the post-9/11 challenges confronting the military.
“A lot of the Army’s transformation effort was geared to a concept of warfare we don’t see in Iraq. The question for the Army is what parts of the transformation are valuable for the future. And it may not be everything that is in FCS,” says Thomas L. McNaugher, a military analyst at Rand Corp.
An eye-popping price tag of $160 billion also raises questions about the Army betting practically its entire procurement budget on a system that may not meet its needs. The ongoing scramble to fund and produce thousands of mine-resistant vehicles for soldiers and Marines in Iraq is a cruel reminder that military procurement decisions have a history of missing the mark. To make up for lost time, the Army will be forced to shift billions of dollars from FCS and other areas to pay for the heavily armored life-saving vehicles.
Lt. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, Army deputy chief of staff for resources, says the service is not going to give up on FCS because doing so would saddle future generations of soldiers with 1970s and 1980s technology for decades to come. Even at a time of war, he asserts, the Army has to modernize for the future.
It would not be unreasonable to speculate that the Army is hedging its bets -- assuming that Iraq will be over in a couple of years and that weapon-buying priorities will revert to “normal.”
But that thinking is not realistic. The world has gotten far more complicated since the 1990s, McNaugher says. Even the notion of conventional warfare is changing. The next “major regional conflict” will not be a Desert Storm but rather will resemble the Lebanon-Israel clash witnessed last summer, he noted. As it plans its equipment modernization, the Army should expect to confront an enemy that is “dug in,” and should seek ways to avoid civilian casualties.
Conventional warfare will not go away, but there will be far different challenges for the United States than what the Army predicted when it envisioned FCS.
So far, it has been hard to see what dramatic advantages FCS would bring to the post-9/11 “asymmetric” fight. A major weakness in today’s force is the ability to find enemies who hide among civilian populations. Many of the electronic sensors and high-tech surveillance systems the Army is developing for the future are still aimed at finding and identifying moving vehicles, but not snipers or kidnappers lurking inside houses.
FCS has yielded some useful technologies such as small drones that can fly at low enough altitudes, and crawling ground robots that can provide close-up views of a potential target. If the program can deliver its much advertised lightweight armor that can protect vehicles without overloading them with thousands of extra pounds, that would be a technology worth funding.
“There’s an enormous amount of pressure on the Army’s original concept of transformation,” McNaugher says. The question for the Army to decide, even as it tries to shield its Future Combat Systems from further budget cuts, is whether it wants to continue on a path to transform into a force designed to fight in a world that no longer exists.
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