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More troops mean more waiting for FCS

By Jen DiMascio, POLITICO

President Barack Obama's decision to add 22,000 soldiers to the Army was welcome relief for a force strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the additional costs most likely will mean further delays for its plans to replace its heavily armored vehicles.

For nearly a decade, the Army has nursed the dream of a new fleet of vehicles, robots, sensors and smart munitions that would revolutionize warfare under a program called the Future Combat System. The different elements would ferret out threats and strike back before they endangered U.S. forces and would replace Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, conceived in the 1980s.

This spring, Defense Secretary Robert Gates dashed those hopes, canceling the program's eight manned ground vehicles, which were planned before roadside bombs began tearing up the underbellies of Humvees in Iraq. However, he is keeping a set of newly developed robots, unmanned aerial vehicles and munitions.

Gates asked the Army to work out new vehicle designs that can better respond to threats in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the Army is expected to roll out requirements for new ground combat vehicles by Labor Day and provide them by the end of September to defense companies eyeing a new competition.

Already, the Army foresees a $700 million bill in the next fiscal year alone to boost the force stretched thin by repeat deployments, which may be paid for by buying fewer trucks and Humvees.

With equipment accounts paying for more soldiers, defense contractors are wondering just how long it will take for the new ground vehicle to emerge.

Early on, Gen. George Casey, Army chief of staff, estimated it would take five to seven years to produce the replacement vehicles. Now, insiders are adding at least another two years.

The budget pressures are really a "microcosm" of pain among all the services, said Scott Bates, vice president of the Center for National Policy, which last week held a discussion about Army modernization.

All the services are scaling back their big expectations.

Rather than F-22 Raptor fighter jets, which cost more than $300 million apiece when research and development costs are considered, the Air Force is now considering lighter, cheaper fighters. The Navy scrapped its next-generation destroyer for an older-model one with upgrades. And the Marine Corps seems likely to lose its new Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle program.

Still, critics are raising questions about whether Gates jumped the gun on laying out a new strategy before the National Military Strategy or the Pentagon's four-year review of needs, the Quadrennial Defense Review, had laid out the Defense Department's intellectual foundation.

Lawrence Korb, senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said he kidded Gates about it at a breakfast just after the new budget was released.

"Suppose the QDR says you ought to go back to the original vehicles for FCS?" Korb said he asked Gates. "I didn't get invited back to breakfast again."

As the review is finished this fall, equipment trade-offs are likely to be the topic of continued debate on Capitol Hill and continued grumbling among defense contractors.

In scuttling the new vehicles, though, Gates raised a more fundamental question about building new weapons.

"The real issue is how to avoid spending time, effort and resources on platforms that may appear quite useful when they are conceived but are rendered far less relevant by the time they come to fruition, if not sooner," Evan Montgomery, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wrote in a recent paper on FCS.

Building a fleet of new ground vehicles that satisfied everyone wasn't easy at the start. For years, the Army argued over whether the vehicles should have wheels or run on tracks like a tank. And should they have hybrid electric engines or diesel ones?

Boeing, the project's lead systems integrator, contracted with General Dynamics and BAE Systems to design eight tracked vehicles with a common chassis and hybrid electric engines. And once the arguments over design were settled, technological difficulties arose.

Now, as the Army designs new vehicles, there are three priorities: their ability to protect against blasts, their size and weight and their computer capabilities.

All the elements are complicated to put together. Adding additional armor adds weight, and additional weight hampers mobility. More computer gear cuts space and adds demand for energy.

The challenge of building heavily protected vehicles that can still perform on tough terrain, as is found in much of Afghanistan, is so tricky that the Army may focus on a smaller number of vehicles — rather than the eight it was planning. Noting the Army's history of trying to reach for the stars on programs such as the Comanche helicopter and the Crusader vehicle — both of which were canceled — a congressional aide suggested there are good reasons to limit expectations.

Another lingering issue is what will become of one of FCS's key elements: its massive computer network and the programs linked to it, such as the new Joint Tactical Radio System.

Network programs on such a scale, with millions of lines of code, are notoriously complicated and fraught with difficulty. It's hard to link them with other programs, especially after they've already been created.

Lt. Gen. Joseph Yakovac, who oversaw the FCS program as the Army's military head of acquisition, is hoping to draw heavily on the work already done, especially in maintaining an overarching network plan.

"Absent that, you are building a network responding to current needs," said Yakovac, now a senior counselor for The Cohen Group, an international consulting firm.

"Until the Army comes up with a new requirement or takes the annex from FCS and says this is still my network, can you then justify having someone to pull that together in a meaningful way?" he asked.