1/13/2014
As modernization funds shrink, the Army is dropping plans for new warfighting systems and relying increasingly on upgrades or modifications of weapons already in the service inventory. A new Ground Combat Vehicle had been planned to supplement the Bradley infantry vehicle shown in this picture, but now the new program looks headed for an early demise while the Bradley may be modified for use as a replacement of Vietnam-era troop carriers. DoD photo by Staff Sgt. Aaron Allmon, U.S. Air Force. (Released) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Every year, the U.S. Army releases an equipment modernization plan that explains how the nation’s oldest military service proposes to maintain its edge in warfighting technology. This year’s plan sets forth a detailed roadmap for upgrading existing weapons and developing new ones as the Army shifts away from a dozen years of counter-insurgency warfare in Southwest Asia to placing greater emphasis on “versatile and tailorable” capabilities. The shift is essential if the Army is to continue playing a co-equal role with other services in a world where neither nation-building nor traditional mechanized warfare look likely to be much in demand.
(Disclosure: Many Army suppliers contribute to my think tank, and some are consulting clients.)
And that’s just what has happened in the last several months. Since the Obama years began, the Army has dropped plans for a new family of networked combat vehicles, canceled both of its next-generation air defense systems, killed a key development effort in its artillery portfolio and starved its armored-vehicle industrial base to a point where both of the plants still assembling such vehicles look headed for shutdown later in this decade. The other military services are trimming modernization plans too, but the Army has the worst record of bringing new programs to fruition. Although its weapon budget is less than half the size of the Air Force’s or the Navy’s, it manages to waste more money through cancellations and restructures.But in the eight months since the equipment plan was released, so many of its programs have been called into question that a casual observer might easily conclude Army modernization is collapsing. A new armored troop carrier that the Army Chief of Staff said “we have to have” as recently as last summer is effectively dead. Both parts of a plan to upgrade armed scout helicopters already in the force while developing a more agile successor look doomed. The service has begun to back away from elements of a new battlefield communications network previously described as its top modernization priority.
The end result is a service that hasn’t seen major renewal of its combat-systems inventory since the Reagan years. Programs begun back then, like the Abrams tank, the Bradley troop carrier, the Apache attack helicopter, and the Patriot air-defense system remain the Army’s core warfighting systems today. They’ve all been upgraded with new sensors, communications links and self-protection features since 9-11, but the Army’s ground-combat arsenal today looks surprisingly similar to what the Reagan Pentagon thought was needed to fight the long-departed Red Army.
There’s a simple historical explanation for how this happened. In the 1990s the Cold War ended, and with the threat gone, the government invested little in new military capabilities (people in the defense industry called it a “procurement holiday,” although for them it was far from festive). In the following decade, the shock of 9-11 was followed by a shift of resources to counter-insurgency warfare that aborted plans for buying advanced warfighting technology under the rubric of “military transformation.” And then in 2010, just as U.S. troops were departing Iraq, the election of Tea Party Republicans to Congress resulted in budget sequestration that capped defense spending.
Thus, every time that the Army began an overhaul of its core combat systems after Ronald Reagan left office, something got in the way. The sequestration provisions of the 2011 Budget Control Act are the big problem today, because savings goals can only be met in the near term by reducing funding for training and technology. The Army plans to trim its active-duty headcount from 570,000 soldiers in 2010 to 420,000 in 2019, but it costs money to remove people from the service, and that limits the Army to reductions of 20,000 personnel each year (Army Times reports that up to 2,000 captains and majors will be selected for separation from the service this spring alone).
Army leaders have been forced to compensate for the slow pace of personnel reductions in meeting sequestration goals by making oversized reductions in training and technology. But they have to be careful with how much training gets cut because the United States is still at war in Afghanistan and could soon be at war somewhere else, so the biggest cuts have fallen on modernization of technology. The service may desperately need a new troop carrier, but it’s easier to work around the absence of a capability you’ve never had than to fight a war with soldiers lacking key skills. So modernization is being cut more than other accounts because the near-term impact of under-investment in technology is more manageable that the consequences of cutting personnel or readiness.
That’s true not only in operational terms, but also in political terms. Every major change Army leaders want to make must be funded by Congress, and weapons that have not yet been fielded typically have less protection on Capitol Hill than just about any other category of military expenditure. Without a warm production line weapon programs lack a hard-wired political constituency, whereas any effort to trim military compensation, bases or missions provokes a firestorm of opposition. Even if Army leaders wanted to protect modernization programs at the expense of other items in their budget, it would be a hard sell with legislators.
But what makes the Army different from the other services is that its leaders never seem as committed to modernization as the Chief of Staff of the Air Force or the Chief of Naval Operations do. Air Force leaders were so determined to protect their prized F-22 fighter that its fate figured in the decision of defense secretary Robert Gates to purge the service’s top leaders. And despite all the budget uncertainties of recent years, the Navy has never backed away from its plan for a 300-ship fleet — including new classes of aircraft carriers, surface combatants, submarines and amphibious warships.
Army leaders aren’t like that. They often show up in top acquisition jobs with little preparation for making complex investment tradeoffs, and they run out of patience with contractors before Congress has even noticed there’s a problem. They rearrange modernization priorities frequently, and abandon long-established acquisition strategies when exposed to even modest outside pressure. To put it succinctly, they just don’t seem to have deep convictions about the modernization process — which can be lethal in a system where successful development efforts often span multiple election cycles and tours of duty.
The problem is apparent in many of the Army’s buying commands, from aviation to munitions to artillery to trucks, but it is perhaps most pronounced in the armored-vehicle acquisition community. Last May, the 2014 equipment modernization plan identified the Ground Combat Vehicle troop carrier as the service’s top combat-vehicle modernization priority, which is the kind of backing the program needed given an estimated manufacturing cost of $10 million per vehicle ($30 billion for the whole program). The proposed system was itself a remnant of the much larger Future Combat Systems family of vehicles on which the service had spent billions of dollars before walking away, and it was supposed to supplement the Reagan-era Bradley infantry vehicle with well-protected mobility for a nine-man rifle squad.
Having ridden in a Bradley, I can report that the only way it could move a nine-man squad in its current configuration is if they were all Munchkins with light backpacks. However, the supposedly compelling case for a successor has somehow evaporated since the equipment plan was released. The service’s leading combat-vehicle development program now is a replacement of Vietnam-era troop carriers likely to be won by — a modified Bradley! Of course, that’s assuming contractor BAE Systems still has any capacity to develop such a vehicle, because it has been warning the Army for years that too little money is being budgeted to keep its key facilities open. With production of Bradleys at its lowest ebb in 30 years, BAE has shuttered several sites and is contemplating closing its main plant in York, Pennsylvania when money runs out at mid-decade.
The situation is just as bad at the nation’s last remaining tank plant in Lima, Ohio, where plans to sustain a minimum production rate of 150 vehicles per year are now endangered by the cutoff of U.S. military aid to Egypt. Prime contractor General Dynamics has been struggling for years to keep the plant open by seeking congressional adds to the Army’s budget request, but the biggest obstacle it has faced is the Army itself. The Army says it doesn’t need the plant’s capabilities until the end of the decade, when it will begin a series of upgrades to the Abrams tanks already in the force. As with the Pennsylvania site, the Army has considered mothballing the tank plant until it is needed — but that inevitably means that a highly skilled workforce will drift away to other jobs.
Conditions may not be quite so depressed in other segments of the Army’s industrial base, but much of the base is facing a bleak future later in the decade as current Army programs end and there is nothing in the pipeline to take their place. The Air Force plans to be buying new fighters, bombers and tankers as the decade ends, while the Navy has protected plans for new warships and aircraft. But much of the new gear in Army modernization plans has been stripped away during the Obama years, and what remain are upgrades to existing systems that will end not long after the President departs office. If the Army can’t persuade political leaders to fund a much more robust modernization agenda, it will be hard-pressed to win wars in a world where potential adversaries have caught up with U.S. technology.
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