For Army's future combat vehicles, flying by C-130 no longer required.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: UPFRONT

The Army has given up on its ambitious goal of building a new combat vehicle that is as durable as the Abrams tank and only one-fourth of its weight.

When the Army first conceived the Future Combat Systems family of vehicles--slated to replace the Abrams and other weapons in the existing fleet in about two decades--one of the specifications was that the vehicles be transportable by C-130 cargo aircraft. That would limit each vehicle's weight to about 18 tons.

Building an 18-ton vehicle that can survive the rigors of combat like an Abrams proved to be too hard and unrealistic from an engineering standpoint, officials said.

Earlier this year, both Army program officials and FCS prime contractors--the Boeing Company and Science Applications International Corporation--decided that the early FCS prototypes would weigh 24 tons, and would not fit in a C-130 airplane unless its tires were flattened and the vehicle was stripped of weapons, munitions, armor kits and high-tech sensors.

"There's been an evolution in thinking in the Army on transportability," said Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey. The shift started when the Army fielded the Stryker light armored personnel carrier in 2001, and realized how tough it was to fit the 20-ton vehicle into a C-130. "Making Stryker C-130 transportable turned out to be a very difficult challenge," Harvey told reporters at a news conference in Aberdeen, Md.

The Army did away with the C-130 transportability requirement and, instead, stipulated that three FCS vehicles must fit in a C-17 heavy lift cargo aircraft. This would allow for a 24-ton FCS.

Paul Kern, retired Army general and former chief of the Army Materiel Command, said the service had struggled with the transportability of FCS for several years. "It's been an engineering concern," he told National Defense. "Keeping the weight down was a critical issue," because, historically, most weapon systems tend to gain weight over time as new components and high-tech gadgets get added to them. Kern does not believe that the weight is nearly as significant a challenge as the integration of the FCS family of vehicles into a single command-and-control network.

"What we want to do in a future combat system is to take advantage of the network ability of a Stryker force and build a force that can go where the enemy is not, and go where the enemy doesn't expect us," said Lt. Gen. James Dubik, commander of Fort Lewis, Wash., which is home to three Stryker brigades.

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