Apr 7, 2009 4:41 PM

Pentagon Chief: Why I Tore Up the Army's 'Future'

Of all the hard choices Defense Secretary Robert Gates had to make in his radical overhaul of the Pentagon’s arsenal, the toughest, he tells Danger Room, was the decision to gut Future Combat Systems, the Army’s $200 billion effort to design a fleet of next-generation tanks and troop carriers. For nearly a decade, the Army […]

Of all the hard choices Defense Secretary Robert Gates had to make in his radical overhaul of the Pentagon's arsenal, the toughest, he tells Danger Room, was the decision to gut Future Combat Systems, the Army's $200 billion effort to design a fleet of next-generation tanks and troop carriers.

For nearly a decade, the Army has worked on a set of lightly armored, deeply networked combat vehicles to speed U.S. soldiers into battle. It's the service's signature effort to upgrade its forces for the wars of tomorrow. But ultimately, Gates says, the Army made the wrong call about how it could wage war in the future. So he eliminated all the vehicles in the Future Combat Systems, or FCS, project.

"Most difficult of all of these for me was the FCS program," Gates says in a Pentagon conference call (.wma). "I actually didn't make up my mind once and for all on it until this weekend."

Today, the Army uses 6-ton Humvees, designed to bring a few soldiers through uneven terrain; 18-ton Stryker troop carriers, to haul infantrymen around an urban battlefield; and 72-ton tanks, optimized for destroying another big army. Under Future Combat Systems, all of these would've been replaced with one family of vehicles, each 27 tons big.

"Trying to build that range of capabilities into a single vehicle —
really we hadn't gotten there yet. And the question is whether you even can do that," Gates says.

The vehicles originally featured a flat bottom that made them perfect targets for roadside bombs, added Vice Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. James Cartwright. "They were adding on armor that was starting to weigh it down and make it questionable whether the axles, the transmissions, all of those things, would be able to function for extended periods of time during a heavy configuration. All of these started to bring into question whether one class of vehicle could in fact cover the range of operations that we envision are going to be the reality of the future."

The Army theorized that if it picked a midpoint between the heavy tank and the light Humvee, between all-out conventional wars and insurgencies, its all-in-one vehicle would work in any situation. Not so,
Cartwright says. Other big forces would tear through that relatively light armor, and so would the metal-shredding bombs wielded by today's militants. Those explosives "are very lethal, and they're very able to be employed by non-nation states in counterinsurgencies. And just bringing that fat reality into the equation makes it very difficult to come with a single class of vehicle."

Gates says he still believes it's "critical" for the Army to get a new ground fleet to replace its trucks and tanks and cannon. But it's going to take time — "15 years or more to implement," he says. The military establishment needs to come to "broad agreement on what that program ought to look like, and then build it out. Start bending steel just as soon as we can."

UPDATE: Gates says he understood that many of his decisions "did not leave smiles on the face of different services, clearly." But now it's time for the admirals and the generals to fall in line, he says: "I don’t want to see any guerrilla warfare on this.... We have a chain of command."

*[Photo: U.S. Army] *

Listen to the whole conference call here.

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