By Jen DiMascio
The secretary of the Army said yesterday the service is considering ways it could speed up development of its top modernization program, the Future Combat System (FCS).
“We’re looking at ways to accelerate it, but we don’t have a way ahead at this point,” Pete Geren told reporters after the hearing, adding that the service is working through the technical aspects of making that happen.
“There are issues that have to be worked through to decide if you can accelerate,” Geren said.
During the hearing, Geren and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey faced several questions stemming from comments made recently by Defense Secretary Robert Gates about the program’s long-term affordability.
They responded that the FCS bill only makes up a portion of the service’s research and procurement accounts and as such would be affordable over the long haul.
But Geren acknowledged that cuts over the last several years will delay the program by seven months and reduce the number of Non-Line-of-Sight Cannons the service is expected to build this year from eight to five. It will build the remaining three next year, Geren said.
“There’s been a lot of questions about its affordability, but if you looked at the $160 billion over the life of the FCS program, at no point does it get to be more than a third of our R&D and acquisitions budget–a third,” Geren told the committee. “We believe it’s affordable and we believe it’s an investment that we have to make.”
Geren added after the hearing that he expects to continue receiving support for FCS from the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC).
“We’ve been able to count on strong support from the Senate Armed Services Committee over the years with FCS, and I would hope that we would continue to have that. I really heard nothing today that suggests otherwise,” Geren said.
In the fiscal year 2008 budget cycle, the SASC added funding for FCS, while its House counterpart cut funding deeply. In the end, the service’s top program sustained a $228 million cut.
Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) said yesterday the program needs to remain affordable.
“It better, unless you’re talking about maintaining 40 years from now today’s Army. I think things are going to change,” Inouye said. “So I think the program that [Rep.] Jack Murtha [D-Pa.] and I support looks into the future.”
He indicated he might support accelerating items from FCS in the first spin out–which includes unattended sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles and networking technology. But Inouye, a World War II veteran, added that it wouldn’t be easy.
“It’s going to be expensive. I fought in a world war that used World War I equipment, and it cost a lot of lives,” he said.
Though the Senate hearing touched on FCS, the war in Iraq dominated the discussion.
Casey and Geren told the panel the service could begin to move to a rotation cycle with 12 months deployed and 12 months at home by July if the service reduces its presence abroad to 15 brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan.