Gen. Peter Chiarelli laid out new details of the Army’s new modernization strategy at an Association of the United States Army breakfast, focusing on the Ground Combat Vehicle effort. Army acquisition officials announced the GCV effort after Defense Secretary Robert Gates killed the 27-ton Manned Ground Vehicles portion of the Army’s Future Combat Systems program in the fiscal 2010 defense budget, criticizing the design as ill-suited to survive current battlefield threats.
“The Ground Combat Vehicle represents one of the most important combat development and acquisition decisions we are going to make in a long time,” Chiarelli said.
These futuristic vehicles, which the Army hopes to develop and begin fielding within seven years, will be designed to be flexible enough to fight in any environment and adaptable enough to be upgraded with technology that surfaces decades into the future, Chiarelli said.
My 2002 Military Review article on designing replacements for our legacy Cold War-era vehicles still holds up, I think.
