By Ann Roosevelt
As part of the Army leadership’s internal discussions on the Future Combat Systems (FCS), it is assessing what organizational capabilities, such as reconnaissance or fires, the next Spin Out could provide, according to officials.
“We’re weighing operational benefits, technological readiness and costs,” Rickey Smith, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) (Forward), part of the Training and Doctrine Command, told Defense Daily. Fielding spin outs are focused on capability packages to organizations, such as the Infantry Brigade Combat Teams, (IBCT) instead of calendar-driven equipment lists. “The Army shifted the sequence to start with infantry units as those are the most in demand, the most vulnerable and need technology advances the most.”
“We already have a dynamic menu of prioritized shortfalls,” Smith said. That means ARCIC and others have examined operational needs statements, identified trends, reviewed lessons learned, interviewed commanders and drawn upon feedback to Army schools and centers as part of the force design update process. This process looks at what each type of unit needs added to it, as well as what the Army sees on the threat horizon in the future operational environment.
It’s not a static process, and is continually being examined and evaluated.
Additionally, we consider what industry, material developers and academia tell us about technology maturity and feasibility, Smith said.
Every two years, the most mature FCS technologies with operational benefit will be evaluated and move out to fielded units. The Army now is assessing priorities and shortfalls in Stryker, Heavy and FCS BCTs to determine what and when FCS technologies would provide the organizations the most benefit.
There’s another piece to this as well.
“What we’re doing has greater utility across the entire joint force and others may want to purchase parts of it,” Smith said.
Defense Department-wide, as the Army solves the use of B-Kits for Humvees increasing networking in an IBCT, the opportunity is there for other services and special operations forces that own Humvees to take advantage of that. Another system with potential beyond the Army is the Non-Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS), which could find utility with the Marines and special operations. Thus, the nation pays only once for research and development.
On the acquisition side, this fall and winter the Army is considering if it is correctly organized to integrate equipment–to include FCS equipment–across the BCTs, Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, program manager FCS (BCT), said at an FCS briefing at the annual Association of the U.S. Army conference Oct. 7.
In late 2000, the Army reorganized the program executive offices along functional lines. Now the question is how to integrate equipment across the BCTs. The “complexity and sophistication of soldiers across the BCT is leading the level of integration, not the organization right now,” Cartwright said.
Analysis is going on now as to how to integrate equipment across a unit in line with the Army Force Generation cycle and how to provide an integrated set of equipment to the BCT. That doesn’t necessarily mean creating an infantry program manager, but how to support a BCT and get it ready, set and trained, he said.
“Are we organized right to do that….we’re probably not,” Cartwright said.