Wrangling over future combat systems raises larger questions.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

A contentious bout of budget drills on Capitol Hill this year featured the Army's top brass mounting a passionate defense of its prized Future Combat Systems.

For the fourth year in a row, Congress has targeted the FCS budget, which many lawmakers view as a convenient pot of money to be dipped into when other projects, viewed as more urgent, are in need of funds.

It remains to be seen whether the Army can reverse a proposed 25 percent cut to its 2008 budget request of $3.7 billion for Future Combat Systems. What seems clear is that the Army's struggle to save its centerpiece weapon modernization program--estimated to cost at least $160 billion over the next decade--underscores a larger conundrum about how the Army sees its future.

The primal question that is emerging from the FCS budget dispute is whether the Army should continue to stick with an expensive program that reflects a vision of the future that has been overtaken by events.

The Future Combat Systems that the Army conceived in the late 1990s was intended to replace a heavy, slow moving force with lighter, speedier combat vehicles and robots, all linked by a high-tech computer network. At the time, the Army was seeking to overcome an embarrassing performance in the Balkans, where its attack helicopters and ground vehicles got bogged down by logistics problems and were unable to engage in combat on short notice.

FCS was the ticket to an agile Army that could rapidly land on a hotspot, easily confront and defeat an armored force, and head home.

Army officials, to be sure, have posited that the Future Combat Systems was designed for a "full spectrum" of operations, and is not necessarily optimized for conventional force-on-force fights.

But it may be too late to sell FCS to a skeptical Congress that does not see how all this new technology could help win in Iraq. The transformation of the Army towards an FCS-based force, experts contend, is misguided for the post-9/11 challenges confronting the military.

"A lot of the Army's transformation effort was geared to a concept of warfare we don't see in Iraq. The question for the Army is what parts of the transformation are valuable for the future. And it may not be everything that is in FCS," says Thomas L. McNaugher, a military analyst at Rand Corp.

An eye-popping price tag of $160 billion also raises questions about the Army betting practically its entire procurement budget on a system that may not meet its needs. The ongoing scramble to...