Future army.

• Author: Krivo, George
• Position: Letters - Letter to the Editor

Noted with interest your feature article on the Future Combat Systems. (National Defense, October 2004).

Many of us who are interested in future ground programs continue to be puzzled that the half of the debate seems to be consistently ignored.

There seem to be certain immutable facts of life--such as where the sun rises and sets, our requirement to pay taxes and die, and the unassailable use of the C-130 as the measurement of what defense systems are considered worthy of development. The knock on many future land programs is that they are too heavy to be rapidly deployed to the modern battlefield. Incredibly, the yardstick used for the measure is the 40-year-old, propeller driven, pro-Cold War C-130. Many of us see this as a distraction ... because at the end of the day, we field new systems, to beat the enemy and keep our guys alive.

The danger of the false assumption that every new weapons system must fit into a C-130 is that we risk developing overly light, less survivable and not as lethal systems for our soldiers to fight and win on the future battlefield.

The Army's Future Combat System (FCS) will be the mainstay of" our future ground force. Forcing all the FCS variants to pass through the ancient design limitations of the C-130 in order to be relevant, is beyond foolish, it is downright dangerous. While we continue to investigate new technologies to replace traditional armor, we find there is no magic solution that allows the weight of the FCS to come down to the 18.2 tons needed to fit into the lumbering and vulnerable C-130. Additionally, the Army is...