Future combat system does not have much of one

NY Times:

The Army hatched a plan a decade ago for a new approach to fighting ground wars. Called Future Combat Systems, it was an ambitious project to develop networks of high-tech vehicles, drones and robotic sensors to act as frontline spies on enemy targets.

“We wanted to go deep and really stretch and see if we could come up with a new conceptual basis for the Army,” said Joe G. Taylor Jr., a retired Army major general who was involved in the early stages of the program.

But that future is unlikely to arrive.

The Obama administration began scaling back the program late last month and breaking it into pieces, as part of a broader effort to overhaul expensive weapons contracts and focus more on fighting insurgencies.

Like many systems, the Army effort came to be seen by top Pentagon officials as too geared for conventional war at a time when the military needs to rely more on troops on the ground, and to provide them with simpler equipment designed to withstand roadside bombs and other more rudimentary attacks.

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Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently canceled the most expensive part of the program, the new combat vehicles that were to cost $87 billion, out of concern that they would not provide enough protection against simple roadside bombs that have killed soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. Gates also ordered the Army to renegotiate an unusually lucrative deal for the Future Combat Systems’ prime contractor, Boeing, which was guaranteed a much higher base fee than most Pentagon contractors. Boeing and its partner, SAIC Inc., stood to earn $2 billion before they proved the system’s components worked together.

The rethinking of the Future Combat program, one of the Pentagon’s most expensive, reflects the increasing pressure on the Army to redirect resources from plans for conventional wars to the possibility of other long-running conflicts with insurgencies in the future.

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There is much more. The problems with the planned systems kept bumping up against the reality of the wars we are currently fighting. Wars have a way of separating things that work from those that do not. They become the ultimate marketplace of what works and what does not. Sometimes more of inferior equipment can still carry the day. That was certainly the case in World War II where the German tanks were much better than our Sherman tanks.

The future of war will probably include more robotics and better situational awareness that will permit our troops to find and destroy the enemy. The shape of the hardware to do that will evolve from current tools we are now using instead of those envisioned by the Future Combat System.