The Army is coming out of a decade of war beat up and strapped for cash/.../ 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/.../
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.”