Wednesday, June 03, 2015

You Magnificant Bastard! You Read My Book!

General Odierno has hopefully killed the impulses that led us to repeated failures in replacing the Abrams and Bradley team with newer vehicles.

Yes!

"I think one of the problems we've had in the past is that we tried to build a perfect vehicle," he said. "The requirements are so high, and they were difficult to meet, and it ended up being over budget and sometimes we found we couldn't meet them."

Well, perhaps he read my 2002 article "Equipping the Objective Force" about the pursuit of that perfect vehicle--the Future Combat Systems (FCS):

Building the FCS, however, is a high-risk venture. The Army should not spend whatever it takes attempting to meld multiple revolutionary technologies into one vehicle for all missions. The FCS should be different from the Abrams and Bradley but must be designed with near-term technology that incorporates modular improvements if the Army is to turn “gee whiz” ideas into actual hardware. ... Barring successfully fielding exotic technologies to make the FCS work, the Army must consider how it will defeat future heavy systems if fighting actual enemies and not merely suppressing disorder becomes its mission once again. The tentative assumptions of 2001 will change by 2025. When they do, the Army will rue its failure today to accept that the wonder tank will not be built.

I'm reasonably sure the Army is at the ruing stage.