Army badly equipped to fight in low-intensity wars.

• Author: Tiron, Roxana
• Position: Up Front

The Army's most ambitious procurement program, the Future Combat Systems, may be directed at the wrong threat--and the service needs to adjust its investments accordingly, asserted a senior official.

Much of the FCS program--a network of combat vehicles and unmanned systems--is predicated upon fighting an enemy who employs conventional weapons and tactics, but the outlook has changed, said Brig. Gen. Philip Coker, director of capabilities development at the Training and Doctrine Command's Futures Center in Fort Monroe, Va.

The focus should be on prolonged low-intensity conflict and on systems tailored for small combat units, he said.

Army intelligence predicts low-intensity conflicts will be the dominant form of warfare through 2025, Coker said. Opponents will possess mostly low-tech weapons, and U.S. forces can expect to see a continuation of urban combat on par with missions in Iraq and the pursuit of roving insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan.

When FCS was conceived in the late 1990s, the Army was anticipating potential enemies making comparable investments in traditional hardware, Coker said at a recent expeditionary warfare conference in Panama City, Fla., sponsored by the National Defense Industrial Association. "Nobody is making those investments," he pointed out, adding that traditional large-scale warfare does not appear imminent.

In this changed environment, the Army must concentrate on meeting technology gaps that affect soldiers at the lowest levels, said Coker.

The Futures Center has identified what Coker terms residual gaps that the Army needs to fill by acquiring the appropriate technology.

The research is based on "lessons learned," he said.

The number one problem for soldiers is network-enabled battle command, Coker said. Small units lack situational awareness technologies, such as Blue Force Tracking, a common operational picture and the ability to fuse disparate data. The flow of information in real time is a problem, explained Coker.

The Army has limited battle command on the move, both for its vehicles and for dismounted troops. Non-line-of-sight communications in non-contiguous battle spaces also are poor, he said. There is insufficient joint data access, limited encryption of satellite communications networks and wideband communications and not enough tactical satellite channels.

Another critical problem is soldier and combat support unit protection in counterinsurgency environments, such as Iraq.

Soldiers need...