Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

Col. Douglas Macgregor & Col. G.I. Wilson • 91These changes in operational control should also involve commensurate reductionsin unneeded Army and Marine Corps overhead. If done well, reducing and, wherepossible, consolidating the services’ four star and three star institutional, administrative,logistical and training commands will return the personnel savings to Activecomponent (AC) and Reserve component (RC) units with operational missions andalso rationalize the distribution of tasks relating to the readiness and training of allmaneuver forces, along with the development of weapons, equipment, force designand operational art.Discarding the Industrial-Age acquisition paradigmHistory demonstrates that cancelling a few billion dollar programs like the Future CombatSystem (FCS) and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV) will have minimal impacton the way the Army and the Marine Corps develop and field new equipment unlessthe structure, culture and thinking that drive current acquisition programs changes. Itis far more important for the next administration to do what the Bush administrationdid not – move away from the industrial age Cold War production lines and dismantlethe multi-decade acquisition system that defense contractors know and love.From the beginning, FCS made no sense. The notion that FCS’s software-dependentnetworked “system of systems” would eliminate the close fight in war by delivering onits promise of perfect situational awareness – a condition of superior knowledge of theenemy and his intentions, and of the friendly force 23 – was always unrealistic. Manyof the FCS program’s key components that are promoted as break-through capabilitiesare, in fact already, present on current battlefields. It is very hard to see what FCS willprovide for $200 billion that the Army does not already have now. 24 Meanwhile, thecost of maintaining the Army’s aging fleets of armored fighting vehicles developed inthe 1970s for use in the 1980s and 1990s will soon reach $2 billion per year. 25Like the Army, the Marine Corps has worn out much of its equipment in Afghanistanand Iraq, and now wants large sums of money to pay for the force the Commandantsays he needs. 26 However, the Marines are not addressing their shortfall in off-roadmobility, armored protection and firepower discovered during the Marines’ hard fightingin Iraq’s Anbar province. 27 In a report to Congress, the Marine Corps inspectorgeneral asserted that the 30,000 Marines in Iraq needed twice as many heavy machineguns, more fully protected armored vehicles, and more communications equipmentto operate in Anbar, an area the size of Utah. 28Instead, the Marines’ are pressing their internally generated demand to conductboth missions – amphibious assault from the sea and warfighting operations on land.The Marine Corps leadership asked General Dynamics (GD) to develop the EFV, whichwas conceived as both a true amphibian that would operate with equal efficiency asa boat in the water and as an armored fighting vehicle (AFV) on land. It has been indevelopment for over a decade. Unfortunately, whatever GD has done to increase the