Where is the budget going?

Well, at least folks are talking about the severity of the deficit these days, but most folks are probably still thinking that the massive military portion is "money well spent." Well guess again. There is an excellent little piece over at Wired News (4/05/04) that is well worth a look - GAO Says Army on Road to Ruin.

The GAO report - DEFENSE ACQUISITIONS: The Army’s Future Combat Systems’ Features, Risks, and Alternatives is pretty damning.

FCS is at significant risk for not delivering required capability within budgeted resources. Three-fourths of FCS’ needed technologies were still immature when the program started. The first prototypes of FCS will not be delivered until just before the production decision. Full demonstration of FCS’ ability to work as an overarching system will not occur until after production has begun. This demonstration assumes complete success— including delivery and integration of numerous complementary systems that are not inherently a part of FCS but are essential for FCS to work as a whole. When taking into account the lessons learned from commercial best practices and the experiences of past programs, the FCS strategy is likely to result in cost and schedule consequences if problems are discovered late in development.

In other words, the FCS (Future Combat Systems) process is funding in full a line of technology that has yet to be developed or tested. They are already behind schedule and over budget, and there is nothing to keep it from going deeper in the hole. Do we hear the familar sucking sound?

According to the GAO report, the intial projected budget is $92 Billion (pg1/3 of pdf count), and the GAO thinks that FCS is ridiculous (though they phrase it more politiely (emphases mine):

FCS is at significant risk for not delivering required capability within budgeted resources. At conflict are the program’s unprecedented technical challenges and time. At a top level, the technical challenges are: development of a first-of-a-kind network, 18 advanced systems, 53 critical technologies, 157 complementary systems, and 34 million lines of software code. From a time standpoint, the Army allows only 5 ½ years between program start and the production decision. This is faster than it has taken to develop a single major system, and FCS has several systems including the network, an Abrams replacement, a Bradley replacement, and a Crusader replacement. To meet this timetable, FCS is proceeding on a highly concurrent strategy that started with over 75 percent of critical technologies immature. Assuming everything goes as planned, the FCS program will begin production before all of its systems have been demonstrated. (pg2/pdf 4)

In other words, they are going to start production before they ever test any of these systems.

What this means is that this is yet another military contractor bonanza and another tax payer boondoggle. It also puts troops who will be required to use these untested systems and equipment at tremendous risk. The purported goal is Rumsfeld's own little wet dream of small groups of high tech specialists taking on the "forces of evil." One small problem is that these small, high tech units are also tremendously vulnerable. We saw this with the military Hummers in Iraq. Sure they were within the specified weight range, but they had no protection from even modest arms. Therefore you had units ordering, and paying for, their own armor for the Hummers shipped to Iraq (while the Pentagon couldn't make a decision). This obviously significantly increases the weight and decreases both maveuverablility and gas mileage. Fast, light, high tech ... prone to failure in my opinion.

The FCS plan "unrealistic" to say the least. As noted in the GAO report, over 75% of the technology is "immature." I think that is a polite way of saying that "its on the drawing boards," or maybe it is just on the "wish list." But who cares, the Pentagon apparently has a limitless budget to play with. It's only money (someone else's money) after all.

Kudos to Wired News for an excellent report.

Posted by rowan at April 8, 2004 7:49 PM | TrackBack | [eMail this article!] |