Three years after then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates cancelled the sprawling FCS program -- the Army's ambitious attempt to build a brigade's worth of high-tech equipment, from light tanks to drones to computer networks, under a single contract -- the Army and industry are still thrashing out the final bill, with a final proposal from lead contractor Boeing not due until September 30th/.../
Of the eighteen vehicles and drones that FCS was developing, only one went into production, a little crawling robot -- formally the "Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle" (SUGV), -- that looks like the baby brother of Johnny 5 from the 1986 movie Short Circuit and which is intended to scout ahead of human troops for roadside bombs and other threats. (It's made by Roomba manufacturer iRobot). But much of the SUGV's technology was developed by DARPA outside the FCS program.
At least some of the technology that General Dynamics and BAE developed for the manned FCS vehicles -- the light tank and its variants -- is being salvaged for their work on the Army's Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), which will be much more technologically modest and much better armored. (Whether GCV itself survives is another question). And FCS spin-offs have appeared in unlikely places: A miniaturized radar developed by Raytheon to track incoming anti-tank missiles was repurposed for a shipboard anti-missile system called SeaRAM.
The single most complex and expensive element of the Future Combat System, though, wasn't anything tangible, but rather the command-and-control network, which would have required about 100 million lines of computer code. In essence, the Army was trying to develop a military equivalent of Microsoft Windows operating system or Apple's iOS, optimized to run programs for artillery fire direction, drone navigation, and the like instead of Microsoft Word. The Army took over the development of this "System of Systems Common Operating System" (SOSCOE) from Boeing when the contract was cancelled, but it was designed to run on cancelled FCS computers and is not compatible with anything else. So far, the Army's surviving efforts to improve its networks use different operating systems that have more modest capabilities but which also actually work.
So while some technologies have spun off from the Future Combat Systems program, "it's very hard to look back and say it was worth it," summed up military analyst Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analyses. "The bottom line is a very expensive failure, a lot invested but very little harvested."
At least, the Army appears to have learned from the Future Combat Systems fiasco: None of its current programs gives the prime contractor the latitude Boeing had on FCS, and none of them is anywhere near as overreaching in its technological ambitions. It's just been an awfully expensive way to learn that lesson.