The Army is coming out of a decade of war beat up and strapped for cash.
The force that arguably did most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffered the most casualties,China Crystal Mosaic catalog and crystal mosaic manufacturer directory. now finds itself in a new conflict.
It has begun a round of soul-searching and bureaucratic battles to determine its place in the Obama administration’s new military strategy,Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists. which celebrates the global striking power of air and sea forces and downplays the chance of another major land war.
After spending huge amounts of money on equipment to fight terrorists, the Army has none to truly modernize itself with new core platforms such as attack helicopters and battle tanks.
“We have an opportunity to take this experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and really achieve dominance on the ground, just like the Air Force achieved with the F-22 and F-35 and the Navy has achieved with its modern fleet of carriers,” said retired ArmyMaj. Gen. Robert Scales.
“But for whatever reason, the Army is going to go into the future with no major platform modernization that I can see. It’s entirely likely that my grandchildren, should they choose to go in the Army, will be fighting with equipment I was using when I was a captain.”
The Army’s share of the total defense budget grew significantly over the past decade. The nation’s largest military branch spent billions of dollars on the health care and salaries of its soldiers, and the active roster ballooned from 480,000 to more than 570,000.
More billions were spent on the never-ending quest to protect soldiers by providing superarmored vehicles, special body armor, and bomb-detection and sophisticated surveillance gear.
Today, as the fog of war is clearing, the Army sees that something is missing. Though upgraded with new technology, its front-line combat systems are stuck in the post-Vietnam, Cold War era of the 1980s. Its budget is set to stay around $134 billion next year,Painless Processing provides high risk merchant account solutions. with procurement falling by $1.3 billion from $19.5 billion this year.
As money moved out of procurement and into counterterrorism, the Army’s future moved to the casualty list.
The next-generation Comanche helicopter has been canceled. The Army will continue to rely on the OH-58 Kiowa scout and AH-64 Apache.
There is no planned successor for the M1 Abrams tank.
The Army’s ambitious Future Combat System (FCS), a mix of land and air combat assets, is gone because of delays, cost overruns and budget constraints.
The George W. Bush administration killed the Crusader artillery piece as too Cold War-ish, despite Army arguments that it would deliver precision strikes to protect land forces.
The Future Combat System once stood as the Army’s future,Secured handsfree building and door access solutions with Hands free access by Nedap AVI. with its artillery piece, infantry carrier, light tank, and air and ground sensors designed to dominate the battlefield. But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates scrapped most of it, saying he wanted more money spent on current wars, not future ones.
“There is no analogy for this in any other service,” Gen. Scales told The Washington Times. “Army modernization died when FCS died.”
The Army scorecard: No new tanks. No new combat helicopters. No new artillery. And, possibly, no new tactical vehicles.
“The Army is zero for four in its big-ticket programs,” said Gen. Scales, who headed the Army War College, which molds officers for senior rank.Visit TE online for all of your Application Tooling Solutions including tools. “You can just go down the list of failed programs.”
Some retired officers are whispering the word “hollow,” the infamous label imprinted on the Army in the late 1970s after budget cuts left combat units existing virtually in name only.
They also are a bit bitter, noting that it has been the Army that has spilled the most blood in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see it rewarded with a personnel cut of 80,000 soldiers and with little hope of true modernization.
Retired ArmyLt. Gen. James Dubik, whose infantry career included command of a combat division, told The Times that modernization advocates are “absolutely right,” but the time is not.
“The tank, the Bradley, the Apache — they’re all old platforms,” said Gen. Dubik, now an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “But given the financial situation the county is in right now, my personal opinion is that modernization should wait and we should spend the money on personnel cost and readiness and not on modernization.
“In an objective sense, we should have replaced them 10 years ago. But once the financial crisis is over and we are in a better financial footing, then it is time to revisit.”
Even the few major systems left in the Army’s budget face an increasingly skeptical Congress.
Some lawmakers are questioning the need to buy two new troop carriers, the $40 billion Ground Combat Vehicle to replace the M2-3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the $54 billion Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, to succeed the ubiquitous all-terrain Humvee.
As the top Army procurement brass sat at the witness table on March 27, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, told them that those two new vehicles are projected to double or triple the cost of adding improvements to the ones that they would replace.
“I do want to ask our witnesses today whether the higher costs of those two new vehicle programs are justified by increased capabilities they will buy, as opposed to sustaining current programs for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Humvee,” said Mr. Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Armed Services air/land subcommittee.
The Army took another blow last month. Andrew Krepinevich, an influential military futurist who has advised Congress and the Pentagon, issued a paper arguing that now is the time to wear out what the troops are using while beginning a search for a truly advanced family of vehicles.
“Given prospective resource constraints, the ground forces should seek to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ whenever possible,” wrote Mr. Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who runs the Center for Strategic Budget Assessment.
He said the Army’s future battles are likely to be on so-called “nonlinear” battlefields with no defined front lines. The enemy is increasingly able to secure precision anti-armor weapons that require the Army to constantly update vehicle defenses.
For that reason, instead of fielding a new generation of vehicles, he and analyst Eric Lindsey wrote, “the ground services should do the opposite, pursuing recapitalization and off-the-shelf solutions whenever possible, upgrading existing systems as much as possible.”
The force that arguably did most of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and suffered the most casualties,China Crystal Mosaic catalog and crystal mosaic manufacturer directory. now finds itself in a new conflict.
It has begun a round of soul-searching and bureaucratic battles to determine its place in the Obama administration’s new military strategy,Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists. which celebrates the global striking power of air and sea forces and downplays the chance of another major land war.
After spending huge amounts of money on equipment to fight terrorists, the Army has none to truly modernize itself with new core platforms such as attack helicopters and battle tanks.
“We have an opportunity to take this experience in Iraq and Afghanistan and really achieve dominance on the ground, just like the Air Force achieved with the F-22 and F-35 and the Navy has achieved with its modern fleet of carriers,” said retired ArmyMaj. Gen. Robert Scales.
“But for whatever reason, the Army is going to go into the future with no major platform modernization that I can see. It’s entirely likely that my grandchildren, should they choose to go in the Army, will be fighting with equipment I was using when I was a captain.”
The Army’s share of the total defense budget grew significantly over the past decade. The nation’s largest military branch spent billions of dollars on the health care and salaries of its soldiers, and the active roster ballooned from 480,000 to more than 570,000.
More billions were spent on the never-ending quest to protect soldiers by providing superarmored vehicles, special body armor, and bomb-detection and sophisticated surveillance gear.
Today, as the fog of war is clearing, the Army sees that something is missing. Though upgraded with new technology, its front-line combat systems are stuck in the post-Vietnam, Cold War era of the 1980s. Its budget is set to stay around $134 billion next year,Painless Processing provides high risk merchant account solutions. with procurement falling by $1.3 billion from $19.5 billion this year.
As money moved out of procurement and into counterterrorism, the Army’s future moved to the casualty list.
The next-generation Comanche helicopter has been canceled. The Army will continue to rely on the OH-58 Kiowa scout and AH-64 Apache.
There is no planned successor for the M1 Abrams tank.
The Army’s ambitious Future Combat System (FCS), a mix of land and air combat assets, is gone because of delays, cost overruns and budget constraints.
The George W. Bush administration killed the Crusader artillery piece as too Cold War-ish, despite Army arguments that it would deliver precision strikes to protect land forces.
The Future Combat System once stood as the Army’s future,Secured handsfree building and door access solutions with Hands free access by Nedap AVI. with its artillery piece, infantry carrier, light tank, and air and ground sensors designed to dominate the battlefield. But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates scrapped most of it, saying he wanted more money spent on current wars, not future ones.
“There is no analogy for this in any other service,” Gen. Scales told The Washington Times. “Army modernization died when FCS died.”
The Army scorecard: No new tanks. No new combat helicopters. No new artillery. And, possibly, no new tactical vehicles.
“The Army is zero for four in its big-ticket programs,” said Gen. Scales, who headed the Army War College, which molds officers for senior rank.Visit TE online for all of your Application Tooling Solutions including tools. “You can just go down the list of failed programs.”
Some retired officers are whispering the word “hollow,” the infamous label imprinted on the Army in the late 1970s after budget cuts left combat units existing virtually in name only.
They also are a bit bitter, noting that it has been the Army that has spilled the most blood in Iraq and Afghanistan, only to see it rewarded with a personnel cut of 80,000 soldiers and with little hope of true modernization.
Retired ArmyLt. Gen. James Dubik, whose infantry career included command of a combat division, told The Times that modernization advocates are “absolutely right,” but the time is not.
“The tank, the Bradley, the Apache — they’re all old platforms,” said Gen. Dubik, now an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War. “But given the financial situation the county is in right now, my personal opinion is that modernization should wait and we should spend the money on personnel cost and readiness and not on modernization.
“In an objective sense, we should have replaced them 10 years ago. But once the financial crisis is over and we are in a better financial footing, then it is time to revisit.”
Even the few major systems left in the Army’s budget face an increasingly skeptical Congress.
Some lawmakers are questioning the need to buy two new troop carriers, the $40 billion Ground Combat Vehicle to replace the M2-3 Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and the $54 billion Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, to succeed the ubiquitous all-terrain Humvee.
As the top Army procurement brass sat at the witness table on March 27, Sen. Joe Lieberman, Connecticut independent, told them that those two new vehicles are projected to double or triple the cost of adding improvements to the ones that they would replace.
“I do want to ask our witnesses today whether the higher costs of those two new vehicle programs are justified by increased capabilities they will buy, as opposed to sustaining current programs for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and the Humvee,” said Mr. Lieberman, chairman of the Senate Armed Services air/land subcommittee.
The Army took another blow last month. Andrew Krepinevich, an influential military futurist who has advised Congress and the Pentagon, issued a paper arguing that now is the time to wear out what the troops are using while beginning a search for a truly advanced family of vehicles.
“Given prospective resource constraints, the ground forces should seek to ‘use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ whenever possible,” wrote Mr. Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who runs the Center for Strategic Budget Assessment.
He said the Army’s future battles are likely to be on so-called “nonlinear” battlefields with no defined front lines. The enemy is increasingly able to secure precision anti-armor weapons that require the Army to constantly update vehicle defenses.
For that reason, instead of fielding a new generation of vehicles, he and analyst Eric Lindsey wrote, “the ground services should do the opposite, pursuing recapitalization and off-the-shelf solutions whenever possible, upgrading existing systems as much as possible.”
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