MODERNIZATION: WHERE THE ARMY WENT WRONG


the Army decided its main focus should be fighting the Red Army in Europe. The service organized its modernization plans around five new systems—Abrams, Bradley, Apache, Black Hawk, and Patriot—and then stuck with them across multiple administrations despite the con- stant attacks of critics.


It helped that there was no big war going on to distract planners and that the Rea- gan administration threw money at the Pentagon the same way that George W. Bush’s White House one day would, but the Army could easily have given in to changing fashions as the Cold War waned. It didn’t, though; it stuck with the “Big Five,” which still constitute the core of its conventional warfighting capability.


But that was the last time the Army suc- cessfully implemented a broadly based modernization agenda. After the 1990s, service plans were repeatedly confounded by changing threats and requirements.


The first big setbacks came during the early years of George W. Bush’s presiden- tial tenure, when a future self-propelled howitzer called Crusader and then a next-generation armed reconnaissance helicopter called Comanche were both killed. Crusader was laid low by a $25 million unit cost and the feeling that it was too heavy to deploy quickly—a big issue in the aftermath of the latest Balkan war. Comanche was terminated because, although it was much more futuristic, it was way off schedule and over budget.


By


the time Comanche—sometimes described in Army circles as the “quar- terback of the digital battlefield”—was killed in 2004, the service had moved on to an unrestrained embrace of the infor- mation revolution. The centerpiece of the new modernization agenda was called the Future Combat System, a family of 18 air


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PROMISING DEVELOPMENTS


Thompson sees the Army learning from past lessons in modernization planning, as witnessed in the ongoing series of Network Integration Evaluations (NIEs). Pictured are Soldiers from the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division at a company outpost Nov. 2, 2011, during the Army’s second Network Integration Evaluation, NIE 12.1, at White Sands Missile Range, NM, and Fort Bliss, TX. The NIEs are helping bring greater network connectivity to the company level so that Soldiers can communicate through voice, data, images, and video, even in challenging terrain. (Photo by Claire Schwerin, Program Executive Office Command, Control, and Communications-Tactical.)


and ground vehicles (both manned and unmanned) supported by a wireless battle- field network of unprecedented capacity.


The Future Combat System was supposed to address a slew of operational chal- lenges the Army faced, such as the need for greater agility and survivability, by collecting and disseminating vital infor- mation around the battlefield at the speed of light. Unfortunately, it reflected the same hubris that infected other Bush-era networking initiatives such as the Transfor- mational Communications Satellite and the Joint Tactical Radio System. Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates canceled it in 2009, mainly over concerns that it failed to provide adequate force protection in its bid to develop more agile vehicles.


There were so many things wrong with the Future Combat System in retrospect that it’s amazing the program stayed on track as long as it did. First, its concept of operations was being falsified on a daily basis by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.


Second, its success depended on pulling off the grandest network integration proj- ect in human history. Third, the price tag was correspondingly imposing, requir- ing hundreds of billions of dollars over a period far exceeding the attention span of the political system.


But that was only the biggest acquisi- tion failure of the new millennium. The Army also managed to cancel both of its next-generation air defense weapons when threats failed to evolve as expected; its planned successor to Crusader; its planned successor to Comanche; and a replacement of Cold War signals intelligence planes. Regrettably, each program expended sub- stantial funds before being killed.


SIGNS OF LEARNING Since there is no cash award associated with being the millionth person to remind Army leaders of how much money they wasted over the past 10 years on programs that were subsequently canceled, I will simply observe that the service finally


Army AL&T Magazine


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