$127 BILLION DOWN PAYMENT

$127 bil­lion? That’s just an ante. A down pay­ment in the biggest, most expen­sive mod­ern­iza­tion pro­gram in the Army’s his­tory: Future Combat Systems, or FCS.
FCS — the Army’s plan to com­pletely over­haul its forces, turn­ing troops into a robot-​​reliant, network-​​heavy bunch — has been slated to cost any­where from $90 to $127 bil­lion, accord­ing to the mil­i­tary.
But on Wednesday, Government Accountability Office eye­shade Paul Francis told the Senate Armed Services Committee said those cost esti­mates were mis­lead­ing, at best. The first part of FCS, Francis noted, the one that weighs in at $108 bil­lion, would only cover a third of the Army’s troops. How much would it cost to upgrade the rest? Well, given the project’s his­tory of delays, switch­backs, poor man­age­ment, and limp gov­ern­ment over­sight — that’s anyone’s guess, Francis said in his pre­pared tes­ti­mony.

Nearly 2 years after pro­gram launch and about $4.6 bil­lion invested to date, require­ments are not firm and only 1 of over 50 tech­nolo­gies are mature activ­i­ties that should have been done before the start of sys­tem devel­op­ment and demon­stra­tion. If every­thing goes as planned, the pro­gram will attain the level of knowl­edge in 2008 that it should have had before it started in 2003. But things are not going as planned. Progress in crit­i­cal areas, such as the net­work, soft­ware, and require­ments has been slower than planned. Proceeding with such low lev­els of knowl­edge makes it likely that FCS will encounter prob­lems late in devel­op­ment, when they are costly to cor­rect. The rel­a­tively imma­ture state of pro­gram knowl­edge at this point pro­vides an insuf­fi­cient basis for mak­ing a good cost estimate.

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