Editorial: Match vision to needs

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Editorial: Match vision to needs

For years, Army leaders insisted on a multiphase approach to modernization: fight the current war, then reset a war-worn force, then upgrade for future threats.

Critics countered that even with its enormous war-won political clout, the Army couldn’t get enough money for a plan to buy reset gear that might be scrapped in the modernization phase. Better the service combine reset with its strategic modernization in one great leap forward.

That now appears to be the Army’s intent. To build a “full-spectrum force,” the Army plans to spend $50 billion to equip soldiers with body armor and other tools, while multiple variants of core systems like tanks, infantry fighting vehicles and air defense missiles will be consolidated into fewer, more capable and easily maintained versions.

It’s a sound step in the complex job of re-equipping a force that is engaged in worldwide combat.

Less clear is how this plan will change the service’s centerpiece, $160 billion Future Combat Systems program. What happens to equipment, often bought helter-skelter for Iraq and Afghanistan, that constitutes modernization but is intended to remain in service for many years?

Does FCS need as large a vehicle element with so many new armored vehicles entering the force, from Strykers or MRAPs? The Army today is better and more experienced than it has ever been, and its company and field grade officers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are learning valuable lessons that will change the service.


Rest of article at: http://www.armytimes.com/community/opinion/army_editorial_vision_071210/