Ironclad future: Army's armored force: mix of old and new.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: COMBAT VEHICLES

A mid uncertainty about the prospect of its ambitious "future combat systems" program, the Army is forging ahead with plans to deploy up to 35 new armored brigades.

Each of these units will be equipped with 60 Abrams tanks and 125 Bradley armored fighting vehicles, many of which will be substantially upgraded with new hardware, officials said. Between 2005 and 2007, the Army will pour at least $7 billion into this effort.

The 35 "heavy brigade combat teams" are one piece of a much broader plan--estimated to cost $69 billion--to reorganize the Army into self-deployable brigades. In addition to heavy armored brigades, the Army will field six Stryker light armored units and at least 30 light and air-assault brigades.

Army officials publicly have stressed that the creation of these self-deployable "modular" brigades, for the most part, is a realignment of existing assets, and does not compete for funds with the mammoth "future combat systems." The FCS program is a family of high-tech vehicles and weapons connected by a single command-and-control network. The Army wants to deploy 15 FCS brigades during the next decade, at a cost of $127 billion.

But a looming defense budget crunch, compounded by the Army's escalating personnel costs and Iraq war expenses, has, for all intents, created an internal struggle for funds that may force the Army to forgo or delay FCS in order to get its modular brigades equipped and ready to fight in the coming years.

War-equipment repairs alone will consume more than $26 billion over the next five years, the Army has estimated.

The upshot is that a "tremendous pull and tug" has developed between FCS and the current force, Maj. Gen. William M. Lenaers, head of the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, told defense contractors at a recent conference. "We have not dropped off our commitment to FCS," he said. But he acknowledged that the Army may have to make tough choices in the future.

Regardless of what fate awaits FCS, the Army appears to be on a path toward fielding 35 heavy brigades by 2008 or 2010. Depending on how far FCS progresses, the Abrams and Bradley vehicles in these heavy units would become the test platforms for the advanced FCS technologies, officials said.

Modernization projects for the Abrams and Bradley vehicles are "bigger than they've ever been," said Kevin Fahey, the Army's top program executive for combat systems.

The heavy brigades also will include M113 armored personnel carriers and Paladin armored artillery guns, Fahey said at the industry conference. While the Army plans to buy several hundred new Bradleys, it will have to make do with the existing fleet of Abrams, M113s and Paladins, many of which are more than three decades old.

"We'll continue to have an obsolescence program," Fahey said. "We'll take advantage of what FCS is doing."

Each brigade will have a combination of older "analog" and newer "digital" versions of the Abrams and the Bradley, said Col. Larry D. Hollingsworth, who oversees the...