By Sandra Irwin, National Defense Industrial Association–
Army spending on new equipment has plunged, and there is no sign of a turnaround. The question now confronting Army leaders is how to build a force to fight increasingly complex wars, and do it on a tight budget.
Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Milley declared “readiness” the Army’s top priority. He says forces today are in top shape to fight terrorist groups like the Islamic State, but less prepared to go to war against more sophisticated armies like Russia’s or North Korea’s. “We are not there yet to deal with the multiple challenges we anticipate,” Milley says during a news conference Oct. 3 at the Association of the U.S. Army annual convention in Washington, D.C.
Milley, along with Army Secretary Eric Fanning, spoke about the balancing act that will be needed to position the Army for the future. “We have to maintain and sustain our counterterrorism capabilities,” says Milley. “At the same time, we have to develop the capability to be able to present the president with options in the event of a conflict with a peer competitor.” He estimates it will take about four years for the Army to attain the readiness he believes is needed for higher-end warfare.
Fanning says rising Russian aggression and the ongoing fight against the Islamic State make it imperative for the Army to modernize its equipment and training facilities. But he cautions that the service will struggle to finance these efforts. There is a $7 billion deferred facility maintenance backlog across Army posts and funding for new equipment continues to be squeezed, with a drop of 33 percent since 2011.
The Army is seeing its modernization budget shrink while those of the Navy and the Air Force are surging. This comes after a decade of conflict in which the Army benefited from the biggest funding increases. Now the Army has to find ways to modernize at less cost. “As a result of increasing enemy capabilities and the reduction in resources available for modernization, soldiers and mission are at an unacceptable risk that may continue to increase,” says a Sept. 26 Training and Doctrine Command memo.
The future calls for an Army that can fight “multi-domain battles,” says Milley. “In space, cyber, air, sea and land, we are going to have to be able to operate in all those domains simultaneously.”
Training and Doctrine Command is drafting concepts for how the Army will fight in this new environment. Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, says that there are no magical technological solutions but cautions that the Army has to “think clearly” about what it needs to do to prepare for future wars.
The post-war budget crunch will be a major determinant in how the Army moves forward with its modernization. Most of the Army’s major weapons systems were designed during the Cold War and no replacement programs are in the pipeline. Budgets for research, development and procurement of new weapons have plummeted by 74 percent in the past six years.
The Army is downsizing and its equipment is aging. All this creates a tough problem for today’s leaders, McMaster says during a conference call. “We have a bow wave to deal with,” he says.
Army ‘Outgunned’
McMaster made headlines in April when he informed Congress that the Army was losing its edge to the point that it was being “outranged and outgunned” by its enemies. But buying new hardware alone is not the answer, he says. To build the future Army, technologies have to be combined with changes in organizations, doctrine, leader development, training and personnel policies.
McMaster posits that the Army is lagging in modernization against both current and future threats. There is no new ground combat vehicle in development. The Army also is falling behind in electronic and cyber warfare. And he worries that the force is ill equipped to fight in “close combat” where enemies likely will deploy lethal drones, tactical missiles and artillery.
“We have to think clearly about the problem and lay a strong conceptual foundation for Army modernization,” he says. “And we must look for solutions that are less resource constrained.”
In a multi-domain battle, the Army would be exposed to threats it is not currently prepared to counter. “All domains are contested in a way we have not seen since 1991,” says McMaster. The Army stopped investing in electronic warfare and intelligence in the 1990s, for instance, because it assumed it would tap into the assets of the other services. It also gutted its programs in short-range air defense and long-range fires. McMaster is especially worried about the increasingly advanced missiles and air-defense systems of Russia and other powers.
“We have to be able to maneuver into unexpected locations and pose enemies with multiple dilemmas,” he says. “We need to project power from all domains. … Russia has established air supremacy over Ukraine. They have long-range fires. Air defense is needed to pose enemies with dilemmas.”
The enemy is becoming “more lethal,” says McMaster. “We need to give our infantry and small units protection and lethality. We need our units to have decentralized combined-arms capability.”
The Army for the first time since World War I does not have a new combat vehicle in development. “We are getting behind in this area,” he says. “Close combat overmatch is important. We can only hang so much stuff on our Bradleys and Abrams tanks before hey are overburdened. If we don’t do something soon, the vehicles we have are going to be overmatched.”
Other items on the Army’s wish list are “layered” air defense systems to protect forces from enemy direct and indirect fire, including armed drones. Army weapon systems also need to be hardened against cyber and electronic attacks.
As the Army’s budget becomes consumed by personnel, maintenance and training costs, officials have to live with the reality that expensive new hardware is not in the cards. In the Army’s base budget request of $125 billion for fiscal year 2017, about 18 percent — or nearly $23 billion — is for research, development and procurement of new weapons. These accounts will continue to get squeezed because the top line will stay relatively flat and the Army has to prioritize readiness and force size over modernization.
“We have to use our existing capabilities differently,” says McMaster. At the same time, the Army has to do a better job explaining its future needs and priorities for modernization, he adds. “We’re working on that.” Leaders have to explain “why a modernized Army is important to the security of the nation, and the risks of deferring modernization.”
Army Training and Doctrine Command has identified seven areas where it will push for additional investments: combat vehicles, future vertical lift, cross domain fires, robotics and autonomous systems, advanced protection, expeditionary mission command, and soldier/team performance and overmatch.
Future Investments
Military analysts David Barno and Nora Bensahel, of the Atlantic Council, warn in a new report that the Army is at a “strategic crossroads.” After 15 years of intense warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is managing the same type of budget and manpower reductions that occurred after World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the end of the Cold War. “Yet, the international environment today is far more dynamic and complex … placing unprecedented demands on a force that is drawing down.”
The Army has to contend with a “pernicious combination of a shrinking force, declining resources, increasing global commitments, and the renewed possibility of major power conflict,” the report says. Leaders face “inevitable tradeoffs between the need to fight today’s wars while preparing for the possible wars of the future — and the need to pay for both in a declining budgetary environment.” This challenge calls for “imagination, creative solutions, and unrestrained thinking about both present and future wars.”
Barno and Bensahel suggest the Army should narrow its wish list to air mobility, mobile firepower in the form of an infantry combat carrier, a protective umbrella against air threats and counter-drone systems.
They urge the Army to get serious about its skills to fight urban operations. “The Army should designate units to specialize in urban operations and improve training for large-scale urban combat,” the report says. Leaders also should develop plans to control large areas and populations.
The Army also will have to recast its relationship with weapon manufacturers as it cannot afford to waste money on technological pipe dreams.
Spending on next-generation Army technology suffered a big blow with the cancellation of the “future combat systems” program in 2009, and the damage has been long lasting. In 2007, the Army was projecting to spend $4 billion on the FCS design and development. In the aftermath of the FCS termination, the Army soured on ambitious tech development and asked contractors build vehicles they could offer as turnkey products.
When the Army sought a new light tactical truck, they told the industry, “’Bring to the table what you can build, and if we like it we’ll buy it.’ And that’s essentially what they’re doing,” says defense industry analyst and former Pentagon procurement official Andrew Hunter, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It’s a choice to focus on buying things in production and not to do development of new systems. And you see that in aviation as well.”
The problem of aging fleets and strained budgets is magnified by the lack of clarity about what conflicts the Army expects to fight, says CSIS analyst Jesse Ellman. “There’s a great deal of uncertainty about what their future missions are going to be, what their future requirements are going to be for those uncertain missions,” he says. “For the foreseeable future, the trough looks likely to continue for the Army, because they just haven’t been able to pin down what their next generation of vehicles needs to look like.”
More Bang for the Buck
Army leaders have warned defense contractors that the days of multibillion-dollar weapon developments are over, at least for now, and that they need the industry to help the service modernize and extend the life of existing equipment.
The Army’s challenges are “driving a discussion on how they use the capabilities they have now, and how they ‘repurpose’ capabilities,” says retired Army Lt. Gen. John D. Johnson, who is vice president of business development at Raytheon.
The downturn has compelled contractors to do business differently, Johnson says at a Raytheon news conference. “We have to be much more precise in the way we communicate with the Army,” he says. “We have to make sure we understand the problems they are facing, so when we make investments, they get the products they really need.”
The company, for example, is marketing to the Army a new satellite-guided mortar projectile it designed for the Marine Corps. “This meets their goal to have ‘cross-domain’ fires” that land forces can deploy to attack ships, or for air defense, explains Paul Daniels, Raytheon program manager for precision indirect fires.
High-tech missiles and projectiles that Raytheon and other companies make for the U.S. military are guided by GPS satellites. One of the growing concerns is that future enemies will jam GPS signals and neutralize a key U.S. technological advantage. Companies are working to harden existing weapons so they are better protected, says Daniels.
Raanan Horowitz, president and chief executive officer of Elbit Systems of America, believes the Army today can benefit from R&D investments made by the private sector. Elbit has developed a precision-guidance kit for mortar rounds that would cost far less than those the Army buys today, Horowitz says in an interview.
The breadth and depth of off-the-shelf technologies available to the military are unprecedented, he says. Missile detection gear for aircraft, virtual reality systems for pilots to land in sandstorms, augmented reality training, Horowitz says, are all examples of cutting-edge technologies that the Army could buy today at prices that would have been unthinkable years ago.
Horowitz says the Army also needs to change its procurement ways and open up the market to new competitors to lower costs. Many of the Army’s equipment acquisitions are made from a handful of vendors that face little to no competition. If the Army were “willing to take some risks with new players,” he says, it might be surprised at how much innovation could be injected into the force without spending more.
The Army may not be developing new missiles or air defense radars, but it will spend money to update them. “Can some of those systems be used for reasons other than what they were designed for?” asks Johnson. “We are working very closely with the Army on how systems can be adapted to serve multiple utilities.”
Companies in the training-systems sector also expect their business to grow as the Army seeks more efficient ways to keep troops ready to fight. New marksmanship simulators that the Army is buying, for instance, can be used at any base even if they don’t have training ranges. “All units can do home-based training” and don’t have to spend money traveling to ranges, says Winn Hines, director of virtual systems sales at Meggitt Training Systems. The company won a contract to provide the “engagement skills trainer” to active-duty Army, National Guard and Reserve units worldwide.
Virtual training is becoming more sophisticated and more acceptable even by traditionalist infantry troops, says Darren Shavers, Meggitt’s director of business development. “We will see changes in training over the next three to five years,” he says. “The Army keeps getting cut, and there is less money to do live-fire training. They’re going to have to put in some type of investment to save money on training.”
‘Tough Choices’ Coming
A team of top Army officials has been directed to analyze the Army’s portfolio of about 780 equipment categories and prioritize. “The results of that analysis will be made available to Army leaders to help guide them in making decisions on how to allocate dwindling Army modernization funds better,” says a Sept. 29 Training and Doctrine Command news release.
Lt. Gen. John M. Murray, deputy chief of staff for Army force development, is leading the strategic portfolio review. His office will work with TRADOC, Army Forces Command, and the office of the assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology to evaluate each program and “determine their relative worth to the Army,” says the TRADOC release. The review is scheduled to be completed and presented to senior leaders by April 2017, and would influence Army budget requests beginning in 2019.
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