New wars, new weapons, new budget. Part II (US Army)

The USAF has been, clearly the most damnified by Gates’ new budget. But the Army didn’t go away to well either.

Many of Army’s Generals’ hopes were under the FCS (“Future Combat System”) umbrella. This complex project joined other ventures, including new drones, new ammunition, new personal weapons and new vehicles, highly interconnected with a dedicated computer network.

Right now, in words of Gates. The Army has 6 ton Humvees to carry infantrymen on open grounds; 18 ton Stryker Armored Personal Carriers to bring a small squad into urban combat theatres; and heavy 72 ton Abrams to combat other first line main battle tanks.

The FCS wanted to substitute all of them for a 27 ton family of vehicles. They should be agile, light armored, fuel efficient and highly interconnected. The project has been going on for almost a decade and at the end it was growing up exponentially in size and prize. In fact, they had become something completely different from the original. And to make things worse, according to Gates we are not even close to have the technology for them and maybe we won’t in at least another decade.

Bad symptoms. But for the Defense Secretary this was a decision we had to take. Hard, but we had to. In fact, this was “the hardest decision” for Gates, who didn’t “make up” his mind about the FCS until the weekend.

Also, the Army had been guessing that a vehicle somewhat in between the Humvee and the Abrams could be used both in asymmetrical warfare and big scale battles. Well, wrong. Tendency in Iraq and A’stan goes into more armor, not the opposite like stated in the FCS foundations. The FCS as a concept was dead.

Well, not all of it. Some small drones and ground robots hill see the battle grounds in the near future. In fact, some of them already are in the hot zones.

Of course, Gates acknowledges that these decisions -specially the ones about the FCS and the F-22- won’t be liked by many Generals. But he warned the military who disagree with him he doesn’t want any “guerrilla warfare on this... We have a chain of command”.



Photo: US Army