When Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey last month almost inaudibly announced the Future Combat System (FCS) centerpiece family of manned combat vehicles will no longer have to be air transportable in the Air Force's C-130 Hercules tactical work horse his pronouncement quietly set aside six years of unrealistic development priorities in the estimated $148 billion future war program that skeptics say will never fly.

Also hidden within his cagey pronouncement is the disconcerting reality that the lean, green fighting machines envisioned by Pentagon planners to replace the unwieldy heavy metal monsters designed for the Cold War had gotten too fat to fit into the ubiquitous inter-theater Hercules haulers. Several Air Force pilots told DefenseWatch that the venerable Hercules can barely stagger into the air with a 19-ton load much less 20 or more tons of ceramic and steel the FCS leviathans have grown to.

That spells big trouble ahead for FCS because the whole idea is to make high-tech widow makers light enough to fly to the Forward Edge of the Battlefield (FEBA) in C-130s instead of by ship and truck the way the M1A1 & 2 Abrams tanks and M2/M3Bradley Armored Fighting Vehicles are delivered today.

Harvey's decision to scrap the C-130 requirement doesn't help the credibility of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld either. Harvey's reputedly uncompromising boss and the undisputed king of leaner-is-better warfare has been hyping FCS since he stepped into the "E" Ring six years ago.

Boeing's $202M per copy  C-17 Globemaster II landing on unimproved runway. Photo: US Air Force

Ditto for current Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker, who told Defense News that, "We're holding it to a standard higher than the Abrams. Greater strategic deployability, greater lethality and greater survivability than the Abrams. Part of that survivability has got to be in the mobility. We want to be able to deploy three of them on a C-17, which means you've got to size them for a C-130. Everybody knows you don't strategically deploy with a C-130; you shuttle stuff around the tactical battlefield on those things."

L. C-130 delivering a General Motors M551 Sheridan light tank using LAPES (low altitude parachute extraction system) . The M551 was another problem-prone program to produce a air mobile lightweight armored vehicle. Photo: US Army

Given the hoopla, hype and hyperbole surrounding the program since its conception in 1995, DefenseWatch decided to take another look at what FCS currently is and isn't. It is a given that the people whose necks are on the chopping block profess to love the FCS concept. BG (P) Charles A. Cartwright, Program Manager for the FCS Unit of Action program, and Dennis A. Muilenburg, the Boeing Integrated Defense Systems Program Manager for the Future Combat Systems, are both ecstatic in their praise of FCS.  Their heady promises for tomorrow's battlefield panacea today is fairly representative of the swill being pumped out in torrents by the optimistic promoters of this moribund billion dollar boondoggle.

"This force - the Army's FCS-equipped Modular Force - will be part of a Joint team that is decisive in any operation, against any level threat, in any environment. The UA (Unit of Action) balances the capabilities for battlespace dominance, lethality, and survivability with its agility and versatility, deployability and sustainability," they wrote in Future Combat Systems – An Overview

So where's the beef?

Mockup of United Defense NLOS-M Mortar vehicle proposed for the FCS family of vehicles. Photo: US Army

The Army says that if all goes as planned sometime around 2014 the lucky soldiers supporting FCS platforms will fight with "18 manned and unmanned (MUM), air and ground maneuver, maneuver support, and sustainment systems, bound together by a distributed network (18+1+1 systems) acting as a unified combat force in the Joint environment," the dynamic duo from Boeing's FCS headquarters in Hazelwood, Missouri said. The exhilarating systems include:

· Unattended ground sensors (UGS)
· Two (2) unattended munitions
· Non-Line of Sight - Launch System (NLOS-LS)
· Intelligent Munitions System (IMS)
· Four (4) classes of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) organic to platoon, company, battalion and Modular Force echelons
· Three (3) classes of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs)
· Armed Robotic Vehicle (ARV)
· Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV)
· Multifunctional Utility/Logistics and Equipment Vehicle (MULE)
· Eight (8) Manned Ground Vehicles (MGVs) including the:
· Infantry Carrier Vehicle
· Command and Control Vehicle
· Mounted Combat System
· Reconnaissance and Surveillance Vehicle
· Non-Line of Sight-Cannon (NLOS-C)
· Non-Line of Sight- Mortar
· FCS Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle
· Medical Treatment and Evacuation

Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor, a Gulf War veteran, armor expert, author and vocal critic of both the Stryker and FCS for a variety of reasons, said both systems are partly based on the "dangerous presumption of perfect situational awareness and perfect information. That is the only way they can survive."

"There is no such thing," Macgregor warned. "We are never going to know very much about the enemy because they are humans and humans are adaptable. The closer you get to the enemy on the battlefield the less you know about him. The best picture of the enemy's intentions is at the strategic or perhaps the operational level. Soldiers on the battlefield – in Fallujah and Najaf - don't know what is around the corner."

The manned vehicles portion of the program crept from the drawing boards to the production facilities in January 2003 when the U.S. Army and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) selected British-owned BAE Systems as the primary builder.  BAE was mated up with General Dynamics Land Systems by lead systems integrator Boeing Corporation to design the still evolving ground vehicle portion of FCS. The billion dollar contracts mandate that the multi-national team produce eight specialized MGVs made from components and subsystems that share the same light weight, air-deliverable characteristics, the Army said at the time.

The actual development of the MGVs began in December 2003 when BAE subsidiary United Defense received a $2 billion contract from Boeing to commence building engineering demonstrators for five MGV variants: the infantry carrier, maintenance and recovery, medical, and Non-Line of Sight Mortar and Cannon (NLOS-M and NLOS-C respectively) vehicles. When all of the systems and subsystems are fielded sometime between 2008 and 2014 (or never), depending on who is talking, the lethal mix of robots and deadly fighting machines will dominate both the conventional arena and the so-called "Fourth Generation" battlefield not unlike what some claim are...