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 Armys future plans hinge on hav­ing Congress autho­rize sup­ple­men­tal money for years to come.”

January 18th, 2005 | FCS Watch | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.