MCCAIN TARGETS “FUTURE COMBAT”

For years, Sen. John McCain has been rip­ping the Pentagon over its sweet­heart deals with Boeing. Now, the Senator is going after the biggest deal of all — the $127 bil­lion Future Combat Systems ini­tia­tive.
Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the most com­plex, most expen­sive upgrade the American mil­i­tary as ever tried. It calls for the reboot­ing of almost every com­po­nent of Army hard­ware, from armored vehi­cles to software-​​based radios to fly­ing drones to the uni­forms G.I.s wear. And Boeing — which got into hot water over its, um, pecu­liar arrange­ment with the Air Force for leas­ing tankers — is one of two com­pa­nies over­see­ing the sprawl­ing effort.
Since FCS began in the late 90’s, the project’s tech­nolo­gies has been rejig­gered, its dead­lines have been shifted, and its goals have been reshaped.
Next month, “Mr. McCain, a senior mem­ber of the Senate armed ser­vices com­mit­tee, intends to look at the vast FCS pro­gram as part of a series of hear­ings on Pentagon pro­cure­ment prac­tices,” the Financial Times reports. “Mr. McCain was con­cerned about the struc­ture of the deal, in which the army has essen­tially out­sourced man­age­ment of the con­tract to Boeing, in addi­tion to cost over­runs… He is also expected to ask the Government Accountability Office [GAO], the over­sight arm of Congress, to look into FCS.“
The GAO tore into the pro­gram and its man­agers this past April for lung­ing ahead with FCS, even when they knew its dead­lines and tech­nolo­gies weren’t at all real­is­tic. What’ll hap­pen next, under McCain’s direc­tion, is anyone’s guess. But I’m bet­ting that there are a whole heap of prob­lems just wait­ing to be uncov­ered here.
THERE’S MORE: “I first requested doc­u­ments regard­ing the [tanker lease] pro­posal in June 2003. Regrettably, since then the DoDs pro­duc­tion of doc­u­ments has been rid­dled by dis­rup­tion, obfus­ca­tion and delay,” McCain wrote in a let­ter to Defense Secretary on Saturday. “Some doc­u­ments that were pro­duced were doc­tored; oth­ers that should have been pro­duced, were improp­erly with­held. To date, after months of assur­ances, par­tial pro­duc­tion on only about 7 out of 36 request cat­e­gories have been pro­duced.“
AND MORE: FCS is “a huge pro­gram, and obvi­ously we need to have a hear­ing on it. I have no pre­con­ceived notions about it,” McCain told Inside the Army today after a Senate pol­icy lun­cheon. “I’m not against it. I’m not for it. I’m not try­ing to do any­thing other than exer­cise our legit­i­mate over­sight of the program.”

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-​​AL) told Inside the Army he sup­ported the idea of a hear­ing on FCS — if only to help sen­a­tors help the Army bal­ance its bud­get, a task com­pli­cated by mount­ing bills from the war in Iraq and other oper­a­tions. Hearings could help law­mak­ers eval­u­ate whether cer­tain tech­nolo­gies could be accel­er­ated even more to help sol­diers fight the war in Iraq, Sessions said.
The new FCS right now, we need more [unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles] which are part of the Future Combat System, but we need them now in Iraq. So you might take some of the money from some of the things that are not crit­i­cal to today and say we’re going to accel­er­ate this part of the Future Combat System, which might sort of be con­tra­dic­tory to the plan we had prior to 9–11 FCS devel­op­ment, Sessions said. But, he added, some of the other things may slip on the timetable.

January 31st, 2005 | FCS Watch | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.