$127 BILLION — “OFF-​​THE-​​SHELF”

The $127 bil­lion Future Combat Systems is the biggest, most expen­sive mod­ern­iza­tion pro­gram in the his­tory of the U.S. Army. So why are its com­po­nents being bought like thousand-​​dollar PCs?
That’s what Sen. John McCain would like to know. As Inside Defense notes, under Defense Department rules — specif­i­cally, Federal Acquisition Regulation 12 — every­day, “off-​​the-​​shelf” items can be bought with a min­i­mum of paper­work and over­sight. Filling out end­less forms just to buy new copies of Microsoft Word doesn’t make much sense, after all.
But nei­ther does apply­ing FAR 12 to Future Combat Systems, or FCS, a pro­gram which encom­passes every­thing from fleets of new robotic vehi­cles to a whole new archi­tec­ture for bat­tle­field com­mu­ni­ca­tions to new uni­forms for the troops.
“The FCS sys­tem is being included in the fis­cal ’06 bud­get as a com­mer­cial off-​​the-​​shelf item. That means that they are relieved of the oblig­a­tion to [give] cost and pur­chas­ing data to mil­i­tary audi­tors,” Sen. McCain told Army Secretary Francis Harvey dur­ing a March 3 Senate Armed Services Committee hear­ing. “Tell me, Mr. Secretary, where might I be able to pur­chase such a vehi­cle com­mer­cially?“
“It’s not — it’s cer­tainly not off the shelf,” Harvey replied. “Senator, you know that. It’s a very heavy tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ment pro­gram.“
“I really think were going to have to change this des­ig­na­tion,” answered McCain, who’s already plan­ning on hold­ing hear­ings on FCS.
Good idea. The FCS pro­gram has already been rejig­gered, its costs have inflated, its dead­lines have pushed back. And, oh yeah, one of the com­pa­nies in charge of the pro­gram, Boeing, is hem­or­rhag­ing top exec­u­tives because of eth­i­cal lapses. Maybe it made some kind of sense, at one point, to apply off-​​the-​​shelf rules to FCS, in an attempt to get the lum­ber­ing pro­gram going. But now, this project needs more over­sight, not less.

March 9th, 2005 | FCS Watch | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.