By Ann Roosevelt
Army officials are meeting stiff questioning on service modernization plans before Congressional defense committees and in recent reports, but the top service civilian believes the new strategy is reasonable and flexible.
“I think the Army has a significant challenge to do a better job on its modernization efforts,” Army Secretary John McHugh said yesterday at a Defense Writers Group breakfast.
Change wasn’t driven by Congress so much as by the Defense Department leadership, he said.
“As 14 year chairman of the Army Caucus in the House of Representatives I would tend to argue that it wasn’t the Congress that didn’t like FCS, it was the Secretary of Defense getting to–in spite of my Army advocacy–(what) I felt was the pretty reasonable decision that it was a broken program,” McHugh said.
The Army’s Brigade Combat Team (BCT) Modernization was developed to implement the DoD secretary’s FCS directives and budget changes.
“We’re taking very seriously the second opportunity that the Secretary of Defense has provided us in gleaning the workable spin offs from FCS and providing us, in this budget alone, $934 million dollars first to begin to develop the next generation of ground combat vehicle,” McHugh said.
The House Appropriations Committee defense panel recently queried service officials on why seven years were needed to develop a new infantry-fighting vehicle and can’t emulate the speedy production of mine-resistant trucks developed for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (Defense Daily, March 26).
McHugh said of the new Ground Combat Vehicle: “It’s a very accelerated fielding calendar. We feel working with manufacturers and industry we can meet it, but we’re going to have to work hard, keep focused and that’s what we’re doing.”
The new GCV would be the first designed to operate in an IED environment with the ability to operate in both urban and off road conditions, Mchugh and Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey told the House Armed Services Committee in joint prepared remarks in late February. The vehicle also would host the service’s network. Also, the vehicle would be able to include technologies as they mature in the future.
Fielding capability packages are another part of the BCT Modernization plan.
“I think it’s a reasonable strategy to construct a modernization program over time that is affordable, that provides you the best opportunity to embed flexibility into it,” he said.
“If there’s anything we’ve learned in the last eight plus years it should be that the theater and the challenges in theater change almost daily and in order to respond to that…in the future, you’ve got to have a mechanism to rapidly, yet affordably field,” McHugh said.
Capability packages would “give our soldiers the tools and the platforms out there to win and come home safely,” McHugh said.