Uphill battle: army's next combat vehicle: new beginning or FCS sequel?

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Ground Vehicles

The Army is racing toward a September deadline to present a convincing case to the secretary of defense that it should receive funds to begin designing a new combat vehicle next year.

The goal is to persuade Defense Secretary Robert Gates to let the Army keep billions of dollars in its budget--which would have been spent on the now-canceled Future Combat Systems--to fund a new project.

This could be a tough uphill battle for the Army, considering how intensely--and unsuccessfully--service leaders had pleaded for Gates to not terminate the program. As originally conceived, FCS was a family of combat vehicles, robots and sensors connected into a battle command network.

Gates allowed for some pieces of the program to stay alive but ordered the cancelation of the combat vehicles that were being designed as replacements for the Abrams main battle tank, the Bradley infantry vehicle and the Paladin howitzer.

The Army for years had struggled to explain why it needed FCS and what benefits the system would bring to the force. Gates regarded it as a symbol of an earlier era, when the Pentagon believed that hightech weapons were more important than people skills. On several occasions, he chastised FCS for lacking "utility and relevance to the kind of irregular campaigns that are most likely to engage America's military in the coming decades." He also was displeased by the huge price tag--$160 billion--and by the Army's management of the program. Because FCS was so complex, the service outsourced the "systems integration" to a private contractor, the Boeing Co. Gates also complained that the Army's FCS-centric strategy for modernizing its combat brigades did not make room for the mineresistant ambush protected (MRAP) trucks that are now being shipped to deployed units. The Defense Department is spending nearly $30 billion on MRAP vehicles, which are considered essential for soldiers to survive in mine-infested war zones, but the Army had no formal plans to include the vehicle in the design of its future FCS brigades.

Army leaders now must make a strong pitch to Gates that whatever new combat vehicle program they end up proposing will represent the needs of the fighting force.

Before he canceled FCS, "Secretary Gates gave us three opportunities to make our case," Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey said at a Center for Strategic and International Studies conference in Washington, D.C. "But I could not convince him that we were incorporating the lessons of the current fight. I thought we had an 80 percent solution. He didn't think we had enough," he said. "That was a fundamental disagreement."

Gates assured Casey that the FCS money would be "fenced" to pay for a replacement.

Casey believes the Army can field a new vehicle in five to seven...