The Department of the Army announced today that it will partially terminate the Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV) development effort under the Future Combat Systems (FCS) Brigade Combat Team (BCT) System Development and Demonstration (SDD) contract with the Boeing Company. The partial termination is for the convenience of the government.
Strategypage writes about the survival of the Abrams as the FCS project falters:
The U.S. Army is having a really hard time figuring out what it's next tank will be like, and that's turned into a major problem. Recently, the Department of Defense forced the army to cancel its $150 billion FCS (Future Combat System) because it was too expensive, too vague and not very convincing. FCS included a replacement for all current armored vehicles. Now the army is pleading for a chunk of the lost FCS billions so that it can get to work on replacements for M-1 tank and the M-2 (IFV) Infantry Fighting Vehicle. The big problem is that the army really doesn't have a design for either of these replacement vehicles. The even bigger problem is that armored vehicle design has hit something of a plateau. There's really no exciting new, game-changing, concepts to justify a new tank or IFV.
As I wrote back in 2002 in Military Review, I hope that the new Stryker brigades would demonstate both the usefulness and limits of light armor for our future Army (then called the Objective Force). I did not think that the wonder tank, merging lightness and lethality with survivability, could be built:
A light, cannon-armed FCS with an antitank guided missile attached and plugged into a tactical network will handle many moderate conventional threats and will be useful in stability operations. Experience with IBCTs may well give the Army a better sense of what light armor can do and lead it to accept that it cannot succeed in all threat environments. The IBCT has a limited role as an early entry force and clearly recognizes that it is not the main fighting force. It will eventually be supplanted by heavier divisions if the enemy is heavy and will fight as a maneuver unit of a division. The Objective Force is to blur that distinction so that the light forces are the main fighting force. The FCS is critical to making this happen.
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. Separated missiles and a sensor grid; active defenses; EGTs; and exotic engines, fuels, and weapons can be retrofitted to defeat more capable enemies. 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.
We did not succeed in developoing multiple advanced and exotic technologies to build the FCS and the plug has been pulled on the project.
The Abrams and its legacy companion, the Bradely Fighting Vehicle, are still the best armored fighting vehicles on the planet, dinosaurs though they may be. The furry little FCS mammals are just more crunchies left behind in the track trails of these still dominant systems.
The Army may even be ruing its failure to accept that the wonder tank can't be built--well, other than the Abrams.
