Army's Future Combat System shakes up procurement culture.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

The Army soon will be soliciting industry bids for the next phase of the Future Combat System, a program that not only is unusual for its unorthodox approach to combat vehicle development, but also is managed by an aerospace firm, the Boeing Co. In this project, the Army is trying to complete in 18 months a process that typically would take five or six years.

Much of the technology that the Army needs to build the Future Combat System is on hand today. But it probably will rake at least five years to orchestrate the pieces of what ultimately will be an intricate network of light combat vehicles.

The Army wants to have FCS in the field by 2008. That schedule is "aggressive," but nor unrealistic, said Maj. Gen. N. Ross Thompson III, chief of the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command.

The Army defines FCS as a collection of aerial and ground, manned and unmanned combat vehicles linked via a command-and-control network.

Contractors are hoping that the solicitation will answer many of their questions about the FCS acquisition strategy, which the Army still was hashing our in late November and early December, officials said.

Adding more uncertainty to the program is the speculation that a budget crunch at the Pentagon will force the Army to decelerate the effort and postpone the FCS deployment by at least two years.

Thompson is adamant that it would be a mistake to slow down FCS, because the program is gaining momentum, at a time when the Army is depending on FCS to forge ahead with its modernization campaign, known as Army transformation.

"FCS should nor slow down," Thomson said during an interview in Dearborn, Mich. When a high-profile program such as FCS intentionally gets delayed, the impetus is lost, Thompson suggested. "If you say you are going to slow down, people will take the foot off the accelerator, which is not what you want to do."

Further, the Army's contractors and in-house labs view the FCS as a do-or-die program, likely to consume most of the service's research, development and acquisition dollars in the decades ahead. For that reason, Thomson said, it's important for the Army to engage contractors sooner than later. "The industry is not necessarily interested in something that is so far into the future that they can't see the dollars and business opportunities," he noted.

The more formidable obstacle in this program, Thompson said, is not money or technology, but rather an ingrained culture that resists change. In FCS, "the barriers we are breaking down are process barriers and attitude barriers about doing things the same old way," he said. "You are seeing, I think, dramatic changes in the way we've done business in the last 18 months or so, to get the capability in 2008."

The potential roadblocks that may preclude the fielding of FCS in 2008, he stressed, are "attitude and culture ... Leaving behind old processes is 90 percent of what needs to happen."

Experts cautioned that the technical difficulties in this program are not to be underestimated. Nobody has ever built a family of 16-ton light combat vehicles and robots that operate in a wireless network. But Thompson remains optimistic. "The technology that we need for 2008 is out there today," he said. "The integration [of the technology] during the next five years will be a significant but doable challenge."

Making this happen will require a different mindset than what the Army has been used to, he noted. "We need to get away from the culture that does things in a sequential approach and start doing things with the tools available today, in a collaborative environment, using modeling and simulation."

Thompson said the Army has spent lots of time coordinating the FCS requirements documents, white papers, doctrine manuals and mission-needs statement. "We think we have the conceptual underpinnings--not perfect, but well along and well developed."

Mapping our the procurement strategy is the Army's acquisition chief, Claude M. Bolton Jr.

He explained that even though Boeing is the "lead systems...