Army officials and manufacturers of combat vehicles have shifted into damage-control mode as the service’s flagship armor-modernization program comes under attack on multiple fronts.
The ground combat vehicle, or GCV, is intended to replace the Bradley infantry fighting vehicle.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers are increasingly doubting the Army’s buying strategy for the GCV. Budget analysts have challenged the Army’s decision to pursue a new GCV design instead of opting for existing, less costly, alternatives. And military experts are raising more fundamental questions about the GCV’s raison d’être. They wonder why the Army is spending billions of dollars on heavy armor for an era that presumably will be dominated by cyberwarfare, surgical-strikes and low-intensity conflicts/.../
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer and president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has suggested the Army end the GCV program and, instead, invest in next-generation technology. Some armored forces are needed — although much less than the Army’s goal of 25 heavy combat brigades — as an insurance policy, Krepinevich writes in a CSBA study. But he argues that spending tens of billions of dollars on a new heavy vehicle is hard to justify. It is not clear that GCV gives the military anything but a “marginal improvement in capability,” he says during a conference call hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. “And why you would spend all that money to get a marginal improvement when there's really nobody racing against you in this area is a bit beyond me,” Krepinevich says. GCV is the "sort of program that bears greater scrutiny."