[Infowarrior] - Gates Rips Heart Out of Army's 'Future'

[Richard Forno]

Pentagon Chief Rips Heart Out of Army's 'Future'
By Noah Shachtman EmailApril 06, 2009 | 4:17:00 PM

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2009/04/gates-rips-hear.html

In 2003, the U.S. Army introduced its plan to wage the wars of  
tomorrow. A fleet of light, networked, electric-powered combat  
vehicles would speed American forces into battle against another  
superpower military — and win the fight almost instantly, thanks to  
its unmatched ability to out-think and out-maneuver any foe. The  
generals called the effort Future Combat Systems, or FCS, and figured  
the whole thing might cost $92 billion.

But, it turns out, just about every assumption the Army had about its  
future was wrong. America's wars wound up being against terrorists and  
insurgents, not other big armies. The enemy weapons of choice in those  
fights -- metal-shredding roadside bombs — made a priority of more  
armor, not less. The U.S. military-industrial complex's attempts to  
make the combat vehicles electric floundered. The projects to provide  
battlefield bandwidth fizzled. The already-massive budget for FCS  
grew, by some estimates, to a truly gargantuan $200 billion. And with  
every added billion and technology flop, the calls to rework or kill  
off FCS grew louder.

Now,  Defense Secretary Robert Gates is looking to all-but-end the  
Army's Future Combat Systems. In his proposal today to radically  
overhaul of Pentagon's arsenal, Gates said he wanted to scrap all  
eight of the vehicles at the heart of FCS — including a next-gen tank,  
cannon and infantry carrier. "I have concluded that there are  
significant unanswered questions concerning the FCS vehicle design  
strategy. I am also concerned that, despite some adjustments, the FCS  
vehicles — where lower weight, higher fuel efficiency, and greater  
informational awareness are expected to compensate for less armor — do  
not adequately reflect the lessons of counterinsurgency and close- 
quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan," Gates said.

When they first launched FCS six years ago, the Army's top generals  
made a bet — not just on the coming wars around the globe, but on the  
politics within the Beltway. Ordinarily, weapons systems are bought  
one class at a time: one particular tank, one particular network, a  
single model of a fighter jet. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, the  
Army saw several of its weapons programs killed off by the Pentagon  
brass. So the generals made a decision, to package what would  
ordinarily be dozens of programs — new vehicles, new robots, new  
networks — into a single effort called "Future Combat Systems." And  
they awarded the massive contract for the whole thing to a pair of  
companies, Boeing and SAIC. The executives and the generals said it  
was to make sure all the gear worked in concert. Critics countered  
that, by combining all those programs into one, it made FCS too  
bloated, too ungainly to ever work right. And by the way, they added,  
why was there so little government oversight of what Boeing and SAIC  
did?

Gates sided with the critics Monday afternoon. "I am troubled by the  
terms of the current contract, particularly its very unattractive fee  
structure that gives the government little leverage to promote cost  
efficiency," he said. "Because the vehicle part of the FCS program is  
currently estimated to cost over $87 billion, I believe we must have  
more confidence in the program strategy, requirements and maturity of  
the technologies before proceeding further."

Bits of FCS will continue. Small ground robots and drones developed  
under the program will be "spun out" soon to the troops. But, if Gates  
has his way, the generals' original vision for Future Combat Systems  
is over. As one Capitol Hill source put it, "They wanted to make it  
too big to fail, and in the process, made it a failure."