The Army and its Future Combat Systems in Jeopardy

For the Army the the future of combat is already here, and the need for FCS is now.

The Army is facing a seemingly intractable problem: as it seeks to maintain readiness and adapt its current force to today’s war, it must also build and integrate a modernized, cutting edge force needed for victory in tomorrow’s battles.   

In March testimony before the House Armed Services Committee’s Readiness Subcommittee, the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, General Richard A. Cody, attributed the start of these problems to what he estimated to be the $100 billion underfunding of Army investment accounts during the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This underfunding created a $56 billion dollar equipment shortage across the Army. Before the Global War on Terror, the Army was able to mitigate declining readiness by transferring equipment from non-deployed elements to units preparing to deploy overseas.  

"This practice, which we are continuing today, increases risk for our next-to-deploy units, and limits our ability to respond to emerging strategic contingencies,” Cody warned.

But with half of its 43 combat brigades deployed overseas and the remainder either recovering from their last tour of duty or preparing for the next deployment, the Army is finding that there is just not enough working equipment to go around. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that the extended nature of the current conflict is causing equipment to wear out much faster than originally projected.  And, with a few notable exceptions, the Army’s equipment that is working was designed for combat against a vastly different foe than the one it is now fighting.    The Army understands it is at a crossroads. The time it has to stabilize readiness while it modernizes for the near and long term future is quickly diminishing.  Unfortunately, the plan to do this is in jeopardy.  The cause: proposed House Armed Services Committee budget cuts of $867 million to the plan’s cornerstone, the Future Combat Systems (FCS). No Seemingly Easy or Cheap Solutions 

Modernizing an army during war is seldom easy and never cheap. But, with its system-of-systems modernization approach, branded as FCS, moving from the drawing board to the testing field and its first spin-out of new capability to be integrated with the current force occurring next year, the Army is laying the groundwork for success. 

Being the first effort of the Army to implement a new, ground-up modernization plan for its fighting force in almost four decades, this is a transformation that is long overdue.  Though the Army made due in the past while the “peace dividend” was spent on domestic priorities, the situation has reached the point where, in order to just keep its troops equipped, it must either begin a wholesale recapitalization and update of its current fleet of weapons systems or develop and field FCS.

The cost of either choice remains high; with cumulative costs by 2040 for either option estimated to be over $250 billion. To some, this amount is prohibitively high when added to a defense budget they already claim must be reduced.  In retrospect however, what will be most remarkable to future students of American defense spending will not be how large the budgets were for our current Global War on Terror, but how small they were compared to budgets during the previous three “long wars” (World War II, Korea, Vietnam) or the last decade of the Cold War.

Current U.S. spending of 3.8% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defense programs  is astonishingly lower than the 38% spent at the close of WWII, the 11.7% spent during the Korean War, the 9.8% spent at the height of the Vietnam War, or the average of 5.2% spent during the last decade of the Cold War.  With FCS estimated to be only 3% of the Army’s total budget, preparing for the near and long term future has never been so cheap.

The Future Requires Leadership Now Even the originator of the FCS cuts, the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), realizes that, “The Army is in trouble. It has a serious readiness problem and has massive unfunded bills for repairing equipment damaged in combat, adding more troops to its ranks, and finishing its modular force conversion.”  But at the same time the actions of the HASC indicate that it may not fully appreciate the nature or extent of the Army’s trouble. Picking and choosing parts of FCS to fund, reducing the FY08 FCS budget by twenty-five percent to pay for other unmet Army readiness needs, and targeting for special scrutiny the program management cost which are the very core of the systems’ interoperability, is not Congressional tough love.  These actions more likely reveal a failure to realize just how dire the Army modernization needs are and a lack of understanding of how readiness and modernization interrelate.    In 2000, former Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki first proposed the FCS project in an attempt to make the Army more deployable, networked, jointly synchronized and survivable.  He asked for and received from Congress funding for the Stryker Brigades that would be the leading edge of the Army’s modernization effort and serve as a bridge to the Future Force embodied in FCS.  But, while Stryker has proven its mettle in combat, Congress has now come up short.  Without FCS, the HASC is potentially making the Army’s modernization effort to date into a congressionally built “bridge to nowhere.”        As the Army’s top force planner, Lt. General Stephen Speakes, said last month, “If these cuts stand, it will have a material impact to Future Combat Systems.”  By not investing in the Army’s future now, it is the soldiers who will be most shortchanged, Speakes stressed. “It’s a betrayal of our trust to Americans when we don’t invest in them.”  Going to War with the Army You have Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was roundly criticized in 2004 simply for observing that, "As you know, you have to go to war with the army you have…not the army you might want or wish to have at a later date.”   Since Rumsfeld made this comment in 2004 the Army has worked feverously to create the army it wants, both now and in the future. It has rewritten its counter-insurgency manual, replaced its Cold War doctrine, and updated its training. The Army has also incorporated a myriad of advanced technologies and lessons learned for Iraq and Afghanistan into its Future Combat Systems to meet current needs in the field and to ensure victory in future wars. The proposed FCS cuts if approved could derail much of this progress.  If so, the cuts to FCS should be subjected to as much, if not greater, criticism than Rumsfeld received, for the cuts will not be mere Congressional statements of fact, but a proclamation to the Army that: “You will go to future wars with the army you have now (even though we admit its broken), not the army you should have (even though we admit you need it).”  The Bottom Line

The Army must remain ready to fight even as it transforms, and transform even as it fights. FCS, by adopting an “in-stride” approach to transformation through rapid prototyping, field experimentation, organizational redesign and concept development will ensure our Army remains dominant today and in the future. The Army’s FCS approach is the most effective way to leverage current resources in order to modernize the force and to maintain readiness while investing in programs that extend U.S. military advantages into the future.

Readiness and modernization are two sides of the same coin; Congress can not choose to fund one to the detriment of the other without both suffering. The good news is that doing both will require funding levels far below what the U.S. has spent during earlier wars.  The bottom line however, is that Congress needs to show the leadership on Army modernization it has shown in the past, and fully fund the Future Combat Systems.

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