National Defense > Blog > Posts > Insider account: Army at risk of repeating FCS mistakes

1/13/2010

Insider account: Army at risk of repeating FCS mistakes
This much has already been widely documented in congressional reports, news articles and think tank studies: The Army's now-defunct Future Combat Systems was nothing short of an acquisition train wreck. What remains to be seen is whether the Army can learn from its mistakes.
 
Defense Secretary Robert Gates decimated the FCS program last year, on grounds that many of its elements were poorly conceived and irrelevant to current wars. Work continues on some pieces of FCS that survived Gates’ budget ax. The Army hopes to build more survivable manned ground vehicles to replace those designed under FCS and canceled. It also continues limited work on robots and sensors vital to its concept of “network centric warfare.”
 
In the post-FCS world, the Army's acquisition woes are not nearly over, argues one former program insider who has decades of experience in military procurements. This dissenter warns that the Army risks repeating the same mistakes it made with FCS, because it has not tackled fundamental reforms to its acquisition system and operational requirements process.
 
Some FCS predicaments were strictly of a technical nature.  A number of technologies -- notably lightweight armor, hybrid propulsion and advanced communications systems -- didn’t perform as expected. Many of these issues have been reported in National Defense over the past several years.
 
Perhaps most crippling of all, follow-on programs will face the same limitations in available networking capabilities and bandwidth that hindered FCS. But there were larger, more significant faults in the way the program was conceived, how its requirements were articulated to industry, and the methods used to push the program through the acquisition process. In interviews with National Defense, this former program participant offers discerning details of what went wrong. This source asked that he not be identified because he was not cleared by the Army to release any information obtained during his involvement in the program.

The former FCS program official sounds alarm bells for the Army and the Defense Department, cautioning that the Army may not be able to benefit from the lessons of FCS because the acquisition system is still "broken." The current process does not create the conditions for honest assessment of the state of technology. Nor does it allow industry to be candid about what is technically and fiscally achievable.
 
From the get-go, FCS was doomed, this former insider says. “It should have been immediately obvious to technically qualified reviewers that FCS requirements had wandered into dreamland. To many of us, it was obvious."
 
The FCS program spent eight years and $15 billion pursuing a fantasy: that soldiers, bombs and bullets could be replaced by remote sensors and networks. Once the money started pouring in, vested interests became too powerful and entrenched, he says.  The Army's senior leaders did not want to risk their careers by pointing out obvious flaws and unrealistic goals. Members of Congress flinched from challenging sub-contracts in their own districts.
 
The biggest reasons why FCS failed were not inadequate technology or program mismanagement, says the former official. "While such factors may have operated... they were not the central issue. The most fundamental problem (of several) was that the Army was allowed to begin spending very large amounts of money to meet force requirements for which there were no proven technical solutions." Despite all the program reviews that FCS underwent, he says, nobody seems to have asked, "Does all of this make sense?"
 
The former official also contends that the original “request for proposals” set the program up for failure by encouraging or even forcing contractors to over-promise. “When companies in defense industry get a Request for Proposal to meet infeasible or high-risk requirements, the current system ... provides no adequate options to fix unrealistic requirements …” “We need to find program management techniques that do not force contractors to lie.  The incentives must change … and the corrections are needed well before the contracting process gets under way --  before requirements are validated in the Joint Requirements Oversight Council.”
 
It should be disturbing to the Army's and the Pentagon's top leaders that the cancellation of FCS hasn't "brought anybody out of the woods or into the light of day." If follow-on programs are defined in the same manner as FCS, the Army will dig itself into a deeper hole -- spending even more money without constructive result, says the former official.
 
“Re-thinking Army transformation and network centric warfare from the ground up are not trivial tasks,” he adds. “But I believe they are necessary tasks.” As Einstein reminded us, “We're not going to get a different or better result by applying the same thinking that got us where we are now.”
Posted at 1:29 PM by Sandra Erwin | Permalink | Email this Post | Comments (2)

Comments

Re: Insider account: Army at risk of repeating FCS mistakes

It's good to know that some people knew it's fantasy: too bad your voice was not heard. I also thought that FCS will never happen because of non-feasible networking.

In my country some people are also trying to pursue the same approach, and it is doomed to fail either. they want YouTube in the battlefield.

The basic problem (which is implied in this articls), is that there is not enough bandwidth in the spectrum to transfer the amount of data (video) between hundreds of unmmaned vehicles, and there is no solution for that! Satellites will not help here.

This issue was well known from day one.
itfilim at 1/18/2010 10:09 AM

Re: Insider account: Army at risk of repeating FCS mistakes

Early feedback is the one thing every program needs to strive for. Nothing else saves as much money in the long run.

If this is not possible, whatever the reason (because only results matter), stop or hibernate the program.
Sean J. Wagner at 1/18/2010 10:52 AM

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