The traditional approach to updating U.S. military hardware — spending years and billions of dollars on next-generation designs — is no longer working for the Army and the Marine Corps as they seek replacements for their combat vehicles.
A new study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “The Road Ahead: Future Challenges and Their Implications for Ground Vehicle Modernization,” warns the Army to avoid the pitfalls of past high-tech weapon programs such as the Future Combat Systems. It also suggests that in the face of shrinking budgets, it might make more sense for the military to invest in science and research, rather that rush to procure vehicles that may not deliver a significant leap in technology.
Despite recent cutbacks in Pentagon spending, the Army and Marine Corps still have considerable funding for new vehicles — the budget request for 2013 includes nearly $2 billion. CSBA analysts contend that deferring new vehicle development and procurement might be a smart move. They posit that sinking too much money into a program today could be too risky considering the Army’s track record of making the wrong technological bets.
One reason for the military to hold off on buying new vehicles is that there are no technological silver bullets to make military trucks, tanks and personnel carriers less vulnerable to enemy weapons, the study says. Adversaries can acquire and deploy antitank weapons and roadside bombs much faster and at far less cost than the U.S. military can build countermeasures and survivable vehicles, CSBA President Andrew Krepinevich says at a news conference. In the wars of the past decade, he notes, the United States spent at least $64 billion on armored trucks and bomb-detection equipment and still U.S. and allied troops have suffered more than 7,000 fatalities in Iraq and Afghanistan, most as a result of roadside bombs and small-arms attacks.
It’s not clear that the Army or the Marine Corps can “get out of this box,” Krepinevich says. Outspending the enemy in this case is a losing battle. “You don’t want to play that game in an age of austerity,” he adds.
“Adversaries’ use of guided weapons, relatively cheap and rapidly fielded anti-armor weapons … threatens to increase significantly the costs incurred by U.S. ground troops in accomplishing their assigned missions,” the study says. The services might be better off fixing current vehicles and keeping them until better technologies come along or until they have a clearer sense of what the future battlefield might look like, the report recommends/.../