The reverberations from Defense Secretary Robert Gates's decision last year to cancel the Pentagon's ill-starred $160-billion Future Combat Systems (FCS) program have been felt nowhere more deeply than by the team tasked with designing the program's Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV), which was billed as the Army's infantry carrier of the future.

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, the Army's focus was on developing and procuring technologies that would allow troops to "see first, understand first, act first and finish decisively" when encountering a threat. This was integral to the design of the ambitious FCS suite of sensor and communications gear and the family of MGVs. While other parts of the FCS program were spun off in mid-2009, the MGV was canceled outright, buried under the sands of Iraq where the Pentagon was thrust into a shooting war it had not trained for, did not anticipate and which did not fit the FCS skill set. Instead of a battle where U.S. forces faced off against tank battalions fielded by a near-peer competitor, the war the Pentagon got was an eye-gouging street fight in the alleys of Iraqi towns, along with confusing cat-and-mouse raids in the mountains of Afghanistan. Standoff was measured in the distance between a buried roadside bomb and the underbelly of a lightly armored Humvee.

While most of the FCS technologies survived in some fashion, the MGV -- with its ballooning weight and requirement creep -- became the albatross of the system, given the difficulties of making it the hub of the complex FCS communications network, while also giving it the armor and protection needed to withstand roadside bomb blasts.

So in May 2009, Gates sent Army planners back to the drawing board, giving them a September 2009 deadline to deliver a new plan for the ground vehicle of the future, now dubbed the Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). The Army has moved quickly to fulfill the secretary's wishes, but at this point -- since the Defense Dept.'s request for proposals was only handed down to industry in February -- it is still too early to say anything definite about the GCV. But given what the Army is looking for, questions about the feasibility of designing a vehicle that can do everything expected of it remains a concern.

Here's what is known so far: The Army hosted two industry days late last year to review "broad-level acquisition strategies and high-level requirements," Paul Mehney, spokesman for the Program Executive Office for Integration, tells DTI. The Army also released to industry its "Manned Ground Vehicle Body of Knowledge" comprised of 40-plus "mature technology plans" that Mehney says are not requirements, "but making [industry] aware that the technology has matured." The current schedule calls for 2-3 competitors to be chosen in late 2010 to fight it out for the right to design the vehicle, with an infantry carrier variant to be fielded in Fiscal 2017. "One of the things we're emphasizing to industry is that you need to look at mature solutions," Mehney says. "We don't necessarily have time to look at immature technologies."

Key requirements for the vehicle are survivability, mobility and versatility, which Mehney sums up as the "urban mobility of a Stryker, with the off-road capability of a Bradley and the survivability of an MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle). The mobility requirements are as important as survivability, because you can't make your battlefield commander's movements predictable. You can't limit his routes; you've got to be able to go in various terrain." While there is no weight ceiling, the vehicle is required to be C-17- and rail-transportable. And in a nod to the irregular wars of the last nine years, as well as to the stability and humanitarian efforts that have become part of the military's mission, the GCV will also be the first tactical vehicle with a non-lethal systems requirement. The GCV will carry troops, too. The Army is looking for designs that accommodate crews of three and nine infantrymen.

This ambitious agenda is enough to raise the eyebrows of skeptics and incur the wrath of those who find folly in the plan. "You can't design a single vehicle to do everything," Rand Corp.'s David Johnson tells DTI. "There is no single vehicle [or chassis] that's going to satisfy the requirement." Moreover, the requirement that the GCV be C-17-transportable does, in fact, impose a weight limit. But some analysts don't see the need for a hard and fast weight requirement. Johnson says that when too much emphasis is placed on keeping a vehicle under a certain weight instead of designing it for the threats it might face, "what we end up doing is tying weight to a desire to deploy rather than employ [a vehicle]." This was, he adds, "the fundamental failure of FCS and of Stryker." Johnson is concerned that the Pentagon has lost its appetite for heavier ground vehicles that provide mobile gun support and forced-entry capabilities. He points to the Israel Defense Forces' (IDF) 60-ton Namer, an infantry vehicle that carries 12 troops, but which is almost twice the weight of the heaviest MRAP.

"What [the IDF] figured out is that when they go into urban terrain, protection is the preeminent issue," he says, adding that the IDF pools big infantry carriers like the Namer, only pushing them out to units when they're going into action, and as in Gaza, only after lighter forces have first breached enemy defenses. But eliminating weight restrictions is, of course, more difficult for the U.S. than for Israel, which only has to move men and material tens or hundreds of kilometers over land as opposed to transporting gear thousands of kilometers across oceans.

No one -- not even the Army -- knows just how much the new GCV is going to weigh, or what it is going to look like. Mehney did say the Army is looking for a modular design, where pieces can be switched out for different missions. He also said there is a network integration and interoperability requirement, and "you've got to give me growth potential in electrical computing power. You've got to be able to integrate the incremental network that we're building. The key difference between this and the MGV in FCS is . . . we're not going to restrict the development of this vehicle to a network, like in FCS."

In essence, the Army is looking for designs that have the potential to grow and adapt as technologies mature and enemies learn. Mehney says the Army's guidance to industry is that "you've got to build a growth potential factor into this, somewhere between 20 and 30%." High on that list are things like the ability to upgrade power and power-generation capabilities, communication networks and survivability. "We are also making sure that industry realizes that the configuration of this vehicle and the employment options for commanders have to be broad-based, Mehney continues. "Don't limit me to one technical solution because you made the vehicle. Contractor X has to make sure that [vehicle systems] can plug in to Contractor Y's vehicle."

All this has to be accomplished on a tight schedule. The GCV program is starting at Milestone A and will go though an analysis of alternatives during 2010. The Army is looking at achieving Milestone B in early 2013, with a first prototype in 2015, followed by a Milestone C in 2016, and the first production vehicle rolling out in 2017.

With a fleet that includes the Stryker, MRAP, Bradley and Humvee, and will soon have the M-ATV (MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle) and in a few years' time the JLTV (Joint Light Tactical Vehicle), is there room for the GCV? Dean Lockwood, an industry analyst at Forecast International, thinks that "from a strictly research and development standpoint, [the Army] needs to work on developing something, but in the near term, there's not really a requirement for it. In the future, yes, but then again, you don't want to get stuck in one mindset."

Photo: US Army