The Army, maligned for a series of expensive acquisition failures over the past two decades, now faces the future armed with aging vehicles and little in the development pipeline.
The Abrams tank, a potent symbol of American military might since its introduction in the early 1980s, is losing ground to foreign counterparts. The service, grappling with a shrinking budget for modernization over the last decade, is focused on incremental improvements to the Abrams and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, rather than new combat vehicles equipped with the latest technologies.
The fiscal picture is unlikely to improve in the short term. For the next several years, the Defense Department's budget will be dominated by major modernization programs initiated by the Army's sister services. The Navy expects to spend $100 billion in 2017 dollars on the Columbia-class submarine, a once-in-a-generation modernization program. The Air Force projects an $80 billion investment in its B-21 bomber program. Additionally, the Pentagon is set to spend billions more on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, currently in low-rate initial production.
After facing intense and lasting criticism for spending billions on ambitious modernization efforts that failed to bear fruit, a chastened Army is lowering its sights to more modest goals.
The Army does not have a combat vehicle under development, and faces long fielding time lines for upgrades to the Abrams and Bradley that add weight to and reduce the mobility of the platforms.
The Army has an "almost wretched history of performance, or underperformance by the Army's acquisition bureaucracy over the last 25 years . . . effectively the entire post-Cold War era," James Hasik, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Inside Defense. "We're working on two-and-a-half decades of almost nothing new, and that which is new is highly derivative."
The specter of FCS
The Army's problems occur against the backdrop of the Future Combat Systems program, which was intended to outfit the service with an entirely new, networked fleet of ground vehicles. The effort tallied $20.7 billion in 2017 dollars before being cancelled in 2009. The Army's subsequent Ground Combat Vehicle effort, intended to replace the Bradley, was cancelled in 2014.
While service leaders insist the Army has moved on from FCS, concerns persist. Sen. Angus King (I-ME) has repeatedly asked officials testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee whether the Army has learned the appropriate lessons from the failure of FCS and sought assurances that history will not repeat itself with a future procurement. The panel's chairman, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), in May lambasted the Army over "tens of billions of dollars . . . squandered on programs like the Future Combat Systems, the Comanche attack helicopter, the Crusader Howitzer, the Joint Tactical Radio System and the Distributed Common Ground System Army."
This enduring criticism may have unintended consequences, as the Army abandons its more ambitious approach in favor of a safer, less transformative path.
"We hear about it every time we testify," Lt. Gen. Mike Murray, the Army deputy chief of staff (G-8), told Inside Defense in June. "The Army gets beat up about Comanche and Crusader and FCS and GCV. . . . So we start listening after a while. And we get into this incremental upgrade."
Thomas Spoehr, a retired Army three-star general and the director of the Center for National Defense at the Heritage Foundation, said, "people have been beat down so hard that their imagination, their views on what's even possible have been diminished, because they are constrained by what they think are the possible funding streams."
The service was crippled by the "collapse" of FCS, which "had come to really represent almost all the Army’s future-looking modernization investments," according to Andrew Hunter, director of the defense-industrial initiatives group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Even if funding were to suddenly materialize, the service now has a "very big trough in the pipeline."
In his previous role as director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, President Trump's National Security Adviser Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster repeatedly noted that for the first time since World War I, the Army does not have a tank under development.
"This is urgent," McMaster said at a November event. "We recognize that we are in a period of increasing risk to our Army's ability to fight, win and accomplish the mission against increasingly capable enemies."
He emphasized the need to develop new combat vehicles.
"You can only hang so much stuff on our existing tanks and Bradleys before they're overburdened -- and they're already overburdened," he said. "And if we don't do something soon in combat vehicles, the vehicles we have are going to be overmatched by potential enemies."
Budget stretched thin
Rather than introducing new combat vehicle platforms, the Army has focused its attention -- and resources -- on gradually upgrading its existing tanks and Bradleys.
Maj. Gen. David Bassett, the Army's program executive officer for ground combat systems, conceded in a March interview that there are "clearly limitations" to the incremental approach, but described it as "a response to a budget situation that really hasn't allowed for the cost of a full-up vehicle modernization."
"Incrementalism was a way of . . . spreading the resources over multiple platforms," Bassett said. However, "the big limitation there is that you can't capitalize on building a vehicle around some advanced available technologies. Or you really can't make dramatically different requirements choices."
Still, Bassett said, the incremental approach "prevents us from having too many things that have to go right on a program simultaneously." By contrast, "if you have four or five things that must succeed, each of which [has] an 80 percent probability, it's not too long before you end up at a probability of success in the 20s. And so, by only changing a few factors at the same time, it allows you to manage that risk more effectively."
Senior leaders have publicly acknowledged challenges facing the ground force in the near future. Murray, the Army G-8, told the Senate Armed Services airland subcommittee in late March that the tanks of other nations, including Russia, have achieved parity with the Abrams.
"I would not say that we have the world-class tank that we had for many, many years," he testified. "I'll be the optimist and say that we're at parity with a lot of different nations."
Competitors include the Israeli Merkava and the Russian T-90. Additionally, Murray described the British Challenger 2 as "pretty close" to the Abrams.
Even as Army leaders admit the limitations of the current fleet, they are emphasizing the need to grow the force from a previously planned 980,000 soldiers in FY-18 to address an ever-widening array of threats. The Army is building toward a total force of 1,018,000 at the end of this fiscal year, and has identified another 17,000 soldiers as an unfunded requirement in FY-18.
The focus on numbers comes at a steep price, as an ever-larger share of the service’s budget goes to manpower. Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, deputy chief of staff (G-3/5/7), told members of the Senate Armed Services airland subcommittee March 22 that "modernization will continue being a bill payer" to support the larger force.
Limited options
The Army's modernization budget has declined dramatically over the last decade, driven by drawdowns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.
Hunter of CSIS drew a distinction between today's climate and the "procurement holiday" of the 1990s, during which research and development continued, meaning new technologies were ready to be fielded once resources returned.
Today's Army has sought to protect early-stage science and technology efforts, but more advanced development has diminished. Instead, the service has focused on upgrading its legacy systems.
Despite the Trump administration’s stated focus on "rebuilding" the military and providing increased funding to accomplish that objective, the FY-18 budget request offers little room for accelerated modernization efforts. Murray told the House Armed Services tactical air and land forces subcommittee in May the Army’s request "sustains, but it does not significantly advance our modernization efforts."
In a February interview, Murray said his equipping plan for the service could become "much more aggressive in terms of modernization" with more funding.
Should additional resources become available at some point, the top programmer said, he would focus on shortening upgrade time lines. The acceleration of efforts such as Abrams and Bradley modernization would free up resources for future vehicle development and fielding.
In the short term, however, those additional resources are nowhere in sight. The Budget Control Act remains the law of the land, and legislators from both parties are loath to implement dramatic cuts to non-defense spending to finance a defense buildup.
The Army is beginning a prototype effort for the Next Generation Combat Vehicle, with the goal of developing technologies that can be leveraged for current and future platforms.
According to Bassett, the service is employing a "strategy that uses those existing platforms, in some cases, as a test bed." This includes an advanced combat engine under development at the Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, which will be tested in the Bradley.
"A lot of what I have to do is to give the Army leadership options, so that regardless of what resource environment we’re in, we can capitalize on those investments," he said.
By building a prototype before even writing a requirements document for a new combat vehicle, Murray said, the Army can determine "what's technologically feasible right now." This approach would enable the service to "write something that’s reasonable," he said, rather than "saying 'I want a tank that floats and swims and flies'" and falling short.
Even as leaders dream of new combat vehicles, the Army continues the slow fielding of upgrades to its existing platforms. The service is working to retrofit its ground vehicles with active protection systems -- technology that has existed for a decade, and is fielded on the vehicles of both allied and adversary forces. The service is testing three non-developmental systems on the Abrams, Bradley and Stryker vehicles, and ultimately plans to field some version of APS across the force.
Army leaders say there simply isn’t room in the budget to support those upgrade efforts while launching a new combat vehicle program. "We can carve off some money to start [research, development, test and evaluation] -- specifically the [R&D] piece of it -- but to start buying a new combat vehicle, you have to find that money some place," Murray said in June. "And, without hurting a whole bunch of other important programs, the right place to find that is within that tank line, for instance, or that Bradley line."
Army experts say the key to emerging from the shadow of FCS and moving forward is to articulate a comprehensive ground vehicle modernization strategy.
"This is a classic chicken-and-the-egg dilemma," said Heritage's Spoehr. The Army's message to Congress is, "'OK, if you give me the money, then I’ll design a new tank.'" Lawmakers, he argued, take another view: "'Well, you know what? I'm not going to give you the money until you start telling me about this new tank. I'm not just going to give you money to allow you to go do it all. I want to hear about this thing; now I'll give you some money.'"