ARMY SLOWING “FUTURE COMBAT” PLANS

Ten days after a damn­ing Congressional report, the Army is begin­ning to scale back its sweep­ing, $92 bil­lion mod­ern­iza­tion plans, Defense News reports.
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 thats 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.
“Its 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 meet­ings 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 Armys $14.8 bil­lion con­tract with Boeing to develop the net-​​centric Future Combat Systems,” Eric Miller writes in a Defense News op-​​ed.

The hon­chos at Alexandria, Va.-based CommerceBasix were not aware that one of the quick­est ways to get in trou­ble at the Pentagon is to tell the truth… The firm also rather bluntly advised the Army that it needed to rework the FCS con­tract because it lacked the nec­es­sary pro­vi­sions to pro­tect the Army and the tax­pay­ers from $1 bil­lion worth of risk. The Army signed the con­tract anyway.

April 12th, 2004 | FCS Watch | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.