Joshua Kucera JDW Staff Reporter
Washington, DC
Originally published September 1, 2005
In 1999 the US Army embarked upon a mission to change the way it fights. Rather than relying on mass and armour, the army, equipped with what it called Future Combat Systems (FCS), would use speed and information to defeat enemies. It was possibly the most ambitious overhaul in the army's history and a radical, untested attempt to rewrite the rules of land warfare.
Now, just six years later, FCS is a multibillion-dollar programme. Elements are already progressing from PowerPoint slides to laboratories and will soon reach the battlefield.
However, technical problems have beset the communications systems that will be vital to FCS and engineers have been unable to make the manned ground vehicles (MGVs) as easily transportable as the army wanted. Critics say FCS is out of place in a world where the enemy uses rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and roadside bombs, not mechanised brigades. Also, mounting budget pressures at the Pentagon will soon force the army to cut something - and FCS is a likely target.
Six years on FCS remains a gamble. If it pays off, it will pay off handsomely. The army will have a high-tech force that it can insert quickly anywhere in the world and can attack so quickly that enemies will have no chance to respond. It could prove a quantum leap ahead of the ground forces of any potential adversary, but it could also turn out to be ill-suited for urban warfare or counterinsurgency, or technical problems could push the price so high that it will be unaffordable. With an army at war and a new set of priorities in the Pentagon, Congress and the White House, FCS is facing the most serious challenges of its short history.
It's not just the future of the US land forces that are at stake. Armies around the world that take their cues from the US need to fight alongside the US Army and buy products from US industry. FCS's fate could determine their future as well.
Technology struggles
FCS consists of 18 systems, from tanks and cannons to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and sensors. A team made up of Boeing and Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) manage a roster of hundreds of other companies working on the programme, including every major US defence contractor.
While much of FCS is proceeding smoothly, two of the most crucial elements of the programme have suffered well-publicised setbacks over the past year, in particular its communications systems.
FCS is meant to be greater than the sum of its parts and army officials believe the strength of an FCS-equipped brigade rests with its soldiers' ability to get information quickly, whether from other soldiers, the brigade's own sensors or intelligence coming from other parts of the army, other services and allies. Compared to current army units, an FCS brigade will know that an enemy is in the area earlier and therefore be able to engage it from a greater distance.
This requires a mobile networking ability the army does not yet have and it has stumbled in its efforts to develop its communications backbone, in particular Cluster One of the Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS), which is being developed by a different sector of Boeing.
In April the army took the unusual step of warning Boeing that it was considering cancelling the contract for the Cluster One JTRS radios because of "anticipated failure to meet cost, schedule and performance requirements". Boeing is still under a partial stop-work order, though FCS officials say that the programme is being reoriented to focus more closely on FCS needs and that they do not anticipate delays as a result.
Not everyone is so sanguine, however, and in June a report from the Government Accountability Office - Congress's official watchdog - warned that if JTRS and the network infrastructure Warfighter Information Network - Tactical do not get on track soon, FCS could be delayed.
"The compressed schedule assumes almost flawless execution and does not allow sufficient time for correcting problems. Significant interdependencies among the critical technologies further increase overall programme risk," the report's authors wrote.
Boeing officials say they will be able to produce 40 JTRS prototype radios by early 2006 for use in exercises. If those radios are delivered and do in fact work, it will go a long way towards allaying fears that network problems will bring FCS to a halt.
Weighty issues
In addition to the communications problems, the Boeing/SAIC team has struggled to keep down the weight of the ground vehicles. The point of FCS is to avoid repeating the experience of Task Force Hawk in Albania during the Kosovo war or the 4th Infantry Division in Turkey during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Both forces were hampered by an inability to move their heavy vehicles by air to where they were needed.
FCS aims to make every vehicle fit on a C-130 Hercules medium-transport aircraft so it can land on unimproved airfields. That goal has been only partially met. According to Boeing/SAIC plans announced in January, while an 18.5-tonne stripped-down version of the vehicle will be able to roll off a C-130 and fight immediately, adding the full load of fuel, ammunition and armour - which will push the vehicles' weight up to 24 tonnes - will take four to six hours on the ground.
Officials from the army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) were not happy about the decision, but the army recently approved the configuration to go ahead.
"The customer decided that they wanted big gun lethality with the survivability package that comes with that, so you bring up the weight on both sides of the equation as you do that, and have to make the adjustments. There haven't been any magic solutions in terms of armour," Vice President of SAIC and FCS Programme Manager Dan Zanini told JDW.
Now programme officials are spinning the heavier configuration as providing a "modular" design that will allow future generations of armour to be integrated easily onto the vehicles.
"You have to look at this as a modular design concept that really has an open architecture built into it, both from a software and a hardware standpoint, so as technologies evolve over time we can, in a straightforward manner, make upgrades and improvements both to software and to hardware, and do so affordably," said Dennis Muilenburg, Zanini's counterpart at Boeing.
It will also force future FCS brigades to use a third more C-130s to get to the battlefield, though TRADOC officials have said that they do not believe that the US will suffer operationally as a result.
Is it relevant?
FCS was designed before the invasion of Iraq, when the US was expecting future conflicts to be against more traditional armed forces, not diffuse insurgent groups using cheap but effective RPGs and improvised explosive devices (IEDs). US armoured units were already far superior to any immediate foe and army planners in a post-Cold War strategic pause had the luxury of thinking creatively about the future.
In 2005, FCS looks very different. Many critics, observing the threats the US is facing in Iraq, wonder if a lightly armoured 24-tonne vehicle will be the right thing to use on streets with IEDs that can kill soldiers in 70-tonne Abrams main battle tanks (MBTs).
The way relevancy is defined now in the US Department of Defense (DoD) is how a system or service fits into four "quadrants" outlined by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in the process of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) - countering threats that are traditional (national armed forces), irregular (insurgencies and guerrillas), catastrophic (massive attacks on US soil) and disruptive (leaps in technology that could threaten US dominance).
Traditional and irregular fights are the most obvious realms for ground forces, but there are questions as to whether FCS is useful or necessary in these roles.
"FCS appears to be designed to fight system versus system at extended ranges. The concern is that insurgencies tend to be fought at close range against small groups armed with automatic weapons, RPGs, hand-held anti-tank weapons and IEDs. These insurgents present a small signature which might be difficult to detect and engage in a close fight," said Andrew Feickert, who studies defence issues for the Congressional Research Service. However, FCS proponents argue that the superior intelligence-gathering capabilities of FCS, as well as the Active Protection System that will shoot down incoming rounds, will make the FCS vehicles at least as survivable as Abrams MBTs and Bradley armoured fighting vehicles currently in use.
Paul Kern, a retired general who was the army's acquisition chief when FCS was launched and is now a senior counsellor to The Cohen Group, compared the FCS vehicles to fighter jets.
"A fighter has a thinner skin, but when you put it in the air you can't kill it because it has enough standoff capability, it knows what's around it and it has countermeasure capabilities. That's very much what we're trying to do on the ground plane as well, but how you learn how to do that is a development process," Kern said.
Against traditional armed forces, it's likely that FCS would be more than sufficient against the armies of potential foes such as China, North Korea or Iran.
"There are not a lot of scenarios envisioned where the US Army is going to line up like it did in 'Desert Storm' or take on the massed People's Liberation Army. If you look at the projected modernisation programmes for these three countries' ground forces, the issue could be, 'Do you want to kill these late Soviet-era legacy forces with a five-dollar bullet or the hundred dollar FCS bullet?'" Feickert said.
"Many feel that there is not a compelling case to push for this much capability right now. If a potential adversary was moving in a similar direction, developing first generation systems with enhanced lethality and survivability, there would be a much stronger case for FCS, " he said.
Nevertheless, army officials involved in the QDR are working to convince the DoD leadership that FCS is the appropriate system for traditional and irregular foes.
"If you were to say, 'Do you need to develop the capabilities resident in FCS to defeat a traditional threat? You would have to say no, absolutely not," said one army official working on the QDR. "Traditional capabilities today are good enough to beat a traditional foe. The problem is warfare, and the development of technology used in warfare is dynamic. So for somebody to suggest that 20 years from now the threat that US forces will encounter on the battlefield is likely to look like it does today, that's not true at all.
"We have no idea what the world is going to be like in 20 years ... what we think will be wrong by some order of magnitude of change or will be completely wrong to begin with," the official said.
Budget pressures
Still, questions about relevancy would be much less potent were budget pressures within the DoD not increasing. The overall Pentagon budget is under increasing pressure and the army budget in particular will soon have to start bearing more of the burden of a temporary personnel increase and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are now all paid for by supplementals. When that happens, DoD officials will look for something to cut and the USD125 billion FCS programme will be a tempting target.
Indeed there are already indications that the QDR will recommend cuts or delays in FCS. "Guys at [the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of Programme Analysis and Evaluation] would say. 'Well, it's an army bill so it needs to be an army programme that pays for it'. That's the way they think," said an army QDR official.
"Okay, so where's the money in the army? Other than FCS, there's not much out there. So the fact that FCS is under the microscope is more because there's a money issue in the department, less an issue of [whether FCS is] what we need."
FCS forges ahead
Despite the controversies and budget pressures, various elements of FCS are starting to come together.
Earlier in 2005, General Dynamics Land Systems began testing the 120 mm gun that it plans to integrate onto the Mounted Combat System: the closest thing FCS has to a traditional tank.
In July, BAE Systems for the first time fired a concept demonstrator for the 155 mm 38-cal Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon (NLOS-C). One candidate for the smallest of the UAVs, the Micro Air Vehicle, is being put through its paces at the Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia. The first version of the computer operating system for FCS, the System of Systems Common Operating Environment, has also been completed.
In fact, FCS has reached every milestone in its schedule. In August the programme completed a System of Systems Functional Review, during which 11,000 separate technical requirements for all elements of the programme were finalised.
In October 2006, 'Experiment 1.1' will test several of the more mature elements and use Humvees as proxies for the ground vehicles to work out kinks in how the different parts of FCS work together.
At the end of 2007, an evaluation brigade will start receiving the first elements of FCS: the Intelligent Munitions System, a 'smart' mine; two sets of unattended ground sensors, one for urban use to detect movement in a cleared building and one 'tactical' sensor that would sense vehicles or soldiers moving on a battlefield as well as radioactivity; the Precision Attack Missile, part of the Non-Line-of-Sight - Launch System; and elements of the network, including the FCS Battle Command software.
"We are now fully involved in design activities, we're well beyond the paper stage, we're fully into the hard development that you would expect on a programme," said Colonel Russ Hrdy, FCS project manager for spin-out.
The future of FCS
Since it is so closely tied to the modernisation of the army in general, even if the FCS programme is drastically cut or delayed, significant parts will continue. It is also unlikely - given the history of large Pentagon programmes - that it will continue as is.
One possibility is that once the army is finally ready to buy FCS it will decide to acquire less than the 15 brigades in current plans.
A proposal in the US House of Representatives would cut the programme into its constituent parts and push it back into research and development. Even if that particular proposal fails - as JDW went to press it was still in limbo - it is an idea that will remain attractive to lawmakers concerned with the uncontrollable mass of FCS.
Army and programme officials argue, however, that it would be a death knell for the programme because the strength of FCS is in its interoperability and unified development.
"We believe there is no need to do that," said the army's Chief of Staff, General Peter Schoomaker. "It would put us in pretty rough shape."
Another idea that has been floated is to proceed as quickly as possible with the network communications elements and integrate them into current land vehicles like the Abrams and Bradley, while putting off development of the FCS ground vehicles, but one of the most attractive aspects of FCS is that all the vehicles in a brigade would have 90 per cent common parts, drastically reducing the amount of spares a brigade has to carry into battle.
Another proposal, said to be under consideration in the QDR process, would reorganise the way that elements of FCS are 'spun out' into the army to focus on what is needed in the current war.
"You could ask yourself. Does [commander of the US forces in Iraq] General [George] Casey need NLOS-C in Iraq today? Why are we spinning it out? I think there might be some discussion directed at the army. Is there a way to do this better, to spin out things that are more critical in the near term and push the other things longer term?" an army QDR official said.
However, FCS officials note that technology is ready when it is ready and that the programme is trying to draw a balance between dispatching useful equipment out to forces as quickly as possible and maturing the other technology. For example, the NLOS-C will be the first iteration of an FCS ground vehicle and therefore will provide useful data for FCS designers. The army is being tight-lipped about what sorts of alternative plans it may have for FCS, fearing that if lawmakers or Pentagon officials are presented with a cheaper option they may seize upon it.
"The army leadership position at this point in time is, it will resolve itself when it becomes an issue. Right now it's not an issue," an army QDR official said. "Is there likely to be more emphasis on spin-outs than on buying 15 brigades of stuff? My gut feeling tells me yes, but we don't have to make that decision today because we're not at that point."
"I've gone through, since the 1980s, a number of major programmes that all the services have developed and every one of them has had challenges along the way," said Kern. "If you go back and look at the press reporting, everyone said it was doomed. Most of them ... came out as successes, but along the way there were serious problems that had to be worked through. I don't minimise the problems but I do believe they'll find solutions for them."
Related Articles:
JTRS to participate in FCS exercises (jdw.janes. com, 19/08/05)
US Army marches on with Future Combat Systems programme (idr.janes.com, 31/05/05)
FCS programme facts
* FCS will consist of 18 systems, including eight manned ground
vehicles, four UAVs, armed and reconnaissance robots, sensors and
munitions.
* The first full unit fielding of the system is scheduled for 2014, but
various elements of the programme will be fielded to an evaluation
brigade at two-year intervals starting in 2008.
* The total cost is estimated to run from USD125 billion to as high as
USD150 billion for full procurement of all the systems and the DoD has
requested USD3.4 billion for Fiscal Year 2006 - by far the most
expensive programme in the army budget.
The 18 systems of FCS
Eight MGVs, which will use a common chassis and 90 per cent common components:
* Infantry carrier vehicle;
* Command and control vehicle;
* Mounted Combat System;
* Reconnaissance and surveillance vehicle;
* Non-Line-Of-Sight - Cannon;
* Non-Line-of-Sight - Mortar;
* Recovery and maintenance vehicle; and
* Medical treatment and evacuation vehicle
General Dynamics is developing the MGVs.
Six unmanned ground vehicles (UGV):
* the Armed Robotic Vehicle (ARV) Assault;
* ARV - Assault (Light);
* ARV - Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition;
* Small UGV, which will fit in a backpack;
* Multifunction Utility/Logistics Equipment (MULE) - Transport; and
* MULE - Countermine
United Defense is developing the ARVs, Lockheed Martin the MULE, and iRobot the Small UGV.
Four UAVs, ranging from platoon to brigade level.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Boeing/SAIC are pursuing parallel but separate tracks of assessing UAVs from various manufacturers.
Unattended Munitions:
* Unattended Ground Sensors (Textron);
* Non-Line-of-Sight - Launch System (Lockheed Martin and Raytheon); and
* Intelligent Munitions System (Textron and General Dynamics competing)
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The Mounted Combat System: the closest thing FCS has to a traditional tank. (Source: US Army) |
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The unmanned ground Armed Robotic Vehicle is one of 18 FCS systems (Source: US Army) |
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The Micro Air Vehicle, a candidate for the Class I UAV, took its first untethered flight this year. (Source: US Army) |
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FCS: the system-of-systems (Source: TACOM 1116592) |
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Earlier in 2005, General Dynamics Land Systems began testing the
120 mm gun that it plans to integrate on to the Mounted Combat System. (Source: US Army) |
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