Balancing funding against priorities is the basis of the Army’s acquisition and modernization program, weighing incremental improvements against transformational capability, two top Army leaders told a the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces hearing yesterday.
As Congress finalizes the fiscal year 2012 budget, the panel wanted to know how the service would be affected, as nearly $500 billion in cuts is planned for the Defense Department over the next decade to tackle the deficit, and perhaps further cuts under the sequestration provision of the Budget Control Act, wants to know the impact on Army modernization.
“It remains unclear how DoD would apportion funding reductions and how funding reductions will impact Army modernization programs,” subcommittee Chairman Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) said in his opening remarks.
After a relatively short and sparsely attended hearing, Bartlett called hearings such as this “exercises in futility,” because of the two unanswered questions that must be answered before proceeding.
“Until have a strategy we don’t know what kind of military we’ll need,” he said. And also unknown is “how much money we will have.”
Earlier in the hearing, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Lennox, deputy chief of staff of the Army G-8, noted one of his staff said modernization was a little like driving in the dark, where you “only see as far as your headlights.”
Lennox said the service top priorities aim at transformational capabilities, such as the network that will empower soldiers as never before with digital data and voice capabilities, and the ground combat vehicle which will provide protected mobility. Incremental modernization is planned for lower priority programs.
For example, he said, the Abrams tank is still the most capable tank in the world, so it is lower on the priority list. The service plans, for example, to do engineering change proposals to get at space, weight and power issues now, and then down the road go after energy usage and future capabilities.
Lt. Gen. William Phillips, military deputy to the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics and Technology), told panel members they are concerned about the budget and what it would mean for research and development. “If we want to make sure to maintain a world class Army, we can’t stop investing into their future.”
The budget will have a tremendous impact on the R&D program and the Small Business Innovative Research programs that often provide innovative research, he said.
Lennox said the budget will influence what happens with the M4 carbine currently in use–about 500,000 of them.
Tomorrow is the closing date for a request for proposals to industry to show the Army what it can do for a new and better M4A1 carbine, Phillips said. At the end of the process, the service will do a business case analysis. “We have to get it right, soldiers trust us to give them the best” possible equipment,” he said.
Phillips said the current M4A1 has had more than 60 upgrades and there will be more, with plans for an ambidextrous trigger and a heavier barrel.
Gaveling the hearing to a close, Bartlett said, “I apologize for the uncertainty” about future national strategy and funding that makes Army acquisition and modernization strategy more complex.