MODERNIZATION:


WHERE THE ARMY WENT WRONG by Dr. Loren B. Thompson


A


rmies at war are not noted for frugality or vision on the home front. When Soldiers’ lives are on the line, their needs are met


first and military leaders worry about other matters later.


But the fact that America’s Army has been at war for 10 straight years—much of that time on multiple fronts—doesn’t fully explain what went wrong with the modernization of Cold War weapons inventories during the first decade of the new millennium.


AVIATION MOVES FORWARD


The Army’s aviation assets have weathered past modernization mistakes well, Thompson believes, with “a lot of life” left in the Apache, Black Hawk, Chinook, and Kiowa helicopters and the Army dedicated to continuing incremental improvements to the fleet. Here, an AH-64D Apache Longbow lands after demonstrating its capabilities in the Manned Unmanned Systems Integration Capability Exercise conducted at Dugway Proving Ground, UT, in September 2011. (Photo by SPC Latoya Wiggins.)


The service proved it could meet the needs of Soldiers under fire fast as long as it had access to endless amounts of money. Efforts to respond to urgent challenges, such as improvised explosive devices, unfolded with impressive rapidity, and the force proved it was capable of adapting despite being chronically overextended.


But meanwhile, plans to equip the “Army After Next”—the force of the future— made little progress, exhibiting about as much rigor as the Ottoman military, circa 1913. What went wrong?


UNSTABLE REQUIREMENTS The problem wasn’t lack of money. Under the Bush administration, the Army’s base budget increased steadily despite the fact that the cost of overseas contingencies was covered separately by emergency supple- mental appropriations. The real problem, it seems, lay in a failure to anticipate how threats were changing and to identify a stable set of requirements to guide long- term modernization plans.


This is the precise opposite of what hap- pened in the early post-Vietnam era, when


ASC.ARMY.MIL


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COMMENTARY


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