Issues Facing the Army's Future Combat Systems Program

Under its transformation efforts, the Army plans to change the way it organizes, trains, deploys, and equips its forces. It expects the future force to be organized around brigade-size units that perform virtually all Army combat functions. The Army wants to fully equip these units with the Future Combat Systems (FCS), a family of 18 networked, warfighting systems which are intended to be more lethal, survivable, deployable, and sustainable than existing heavy combat systems. In order to deploy faster, the FCS vehicles are expected to be a fraction of the weight of existing heavy armored fighting vehicles. The Army believes that nontraditional fighting tactics coupled with an extensive information network will compensate for the loss of size and armor mass by utilizing information superiority and synchronized operations to see, engage, and destroy the enemy before the enemy detects the future forces. The Army has allocated about $22 billion for the FCS program during fiscal years 2004 through 2009 and several billions more for non-FCS programs that the FCS will need to become fully capable. In addition, the Army recently implemented FCS schedule changes, which added about 2 years to the system development and demonstration (SDD) phase.