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![1105 Media [purity]](/images/ds1_pntmlogo.gif "1105 Media [purity]") |
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home > May 26, 2008 issue > article
Back to the future
By Sean Gallagher
The future of the Army’s Future Combat Systems, from strictly a
technical standpoint, would seem fairly certain at this point. But as Kevin
Fogarty reports this month (Page 12), and as we’ve reported previously,
the project’s detractors have plenty of valid reasons to doubt its success.
Part of the problem is that FCS was originally devised for a type of combat
unlike what the Army has seen in the past seven years, based on the experience of
the 1991 Gulf War.
But the biggest problem isn’t with FCS’ technology:
It’s that the project is viewed as a single procurement,
a single system of systems, rather than
the collection of projects that it really is. In a
response to the Government Accountability
Office’s recent criticisms of FCS, the Army pointed
this out: “Many critics of the FCS program, including
the GAO, continue to view the FCS program
through a single system procurement prism that
equates the program to a platform rather than a
family of systems with an integrated network.”
The way the procurement has been run for
much of its history has encouraged that view. And
with the Army looking at replacing large numbers
of systems much sooner than it had anticipated
because of wear and tear from the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, the FCS project’s big budget makes it
an attractive target.
In fact, Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and the House
Appropriations Committee seem focused on pumping
more money into FCS in the near term to deliver short-term results.
There’s a major problem with that approach, one that critics of FCS
already know. By rushing to fix the issues of the current conflicts the Army
is embroiled in, the military could face the same problem again in just a few
years that it has often faced — a military built to fight the last war instead of the
next.
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