DEFENSE WI-FI INFANTRY

Neil Abercrombie On The Army's Future Combat System

by Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.

Saturday, Sept. 20, 2008


Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, chairs the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Air and Land Forces, which oversees the Army's $128 billion Future Combat System. He spoke to National Journal about the service's summer announcement that it was restructuring the FCS, again.

NJ: What's your take on where the Army's Future Combat System is going after its latest restructuring?

Abercrombie: This thing gets more bizarre by the day. They're delaying the test by a year -- how the hell is that an "acceleration"?

What we're looking at keeps changing. The original specifications [for the FCS armored vehicles], especially in terms of weight and size and so on, have doubled. It's constantly mutating. And each mutation is called, "Well, that's what we really wanted to do."

It sounds like I'm attacking them. All I'm saying is, I can't keep up. I understand it's not that easy. This is not commercial, off the shelf; it's not iPod, and we're not downloading "Across the Universe" with Beatles covers. It's very, very complicated, getting more complicated all the time. You are utterly dependent on a network of communications that has to manifest itself in several different venues at once, all of which has to be translated and transposed and transmitted to the individual soldier. That, let me tell you, is a task.

You're dealing with very sincere people who are working as hard as they can. I'm sure everyone wants the emperor to have clothes on.

NJ: Can the Army get the first installment of FCS equipment to work by 2011 on this new testing schedule?

Abercrombie: The assumption is, we are going to just delay the testing for a year and keep the same date for the implementation. That's where the FCS thing starts banging into the realities of what we can do.

The problem with FCS is, they're waiting for Dumbledore or someone to come in and say, "Harry, this is the magic incantation; say this and, believe me, the Dark Lord will be vanquished" -- the dark lord of schedule and testing and delays. They're looking for Harry Potter.

I call it blue-screen theology. You create that magic on the screen but what you have in the end is actors going through the motions in front of a blue screen. Right now, the FCS is at the blue-screen stage.

I've seen the simulation; I know what it is they're trying to do. The question is whether they can do it. If they can't, I'm perfectly willing to say, Nice try -- where do we go from here?

They're saying, "Don't worry; it'll be fine." Well, that very well may be, but the reason you do the testing is to try to make sure. We're dealing with billions of dollars and thousands of troops.

NJ: Will the next president be able to come up with a budget that pays for the Future Combat System on top of all of the military's other needs?

Abercrombie: At some point -- and it's coming fairly quick, in 2009, 2010 -- we've got to decide. That's their schedule, not mine. That transcends presidents.

The thing is slipping away very, very quickly -- not for lack of will, not for lack of effort, not for lack of desire. But you can't find money that doesn't exist if you're going to do the other things like grow the Army in terms of personnel. The Army wants to grow; the two presidential candidates want it to happen. I'm not sure there's any more money to invest.

I'm not looking for villains, but I'm not looking for myself or taxpayers to be made suckers of. Among other things, it's debilitating to the Army and its readiness.

NJ: What are the trade-offs the Army has to face?

Abercrombie: Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said something once that I think has been a bit misconstrued: "You go to war with the Army you have." You've got to make decisions about what you mean when you say you're going to support the troops. In the end, you will fight with what you've got, rather than what you'd like to have, or what you've dreamed of, or what you've projected.

The Army has to be pretty hardnosed in its decision-making about how to allocate its resources, in the context of making sure that it's well equipped, that it's well trained, that it has its full complement of personnel, in terms of whatever missions are going to be required of it.

If you can add things in a way that makes it more efficient or more technologically advanced, well and good; but you can't subsume the basic requirements of readiness to the hoped-of or dreamed-of technological marvels that people are ready to conjure up. If we can't have them, you can't keep trying to get them at the expense of what we can have.