Army’s $200 Billion Reboot Fizzles; Murtha Wants $20 Billion More
The Army’s gargantuan digital modernization plan has turned so rotten, a new congressional report says it’s time to start thinking about killing off the effort, and looking for new alternatives. Rep. John Murtha (D-Pennsylvania), the powerful head of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, has another plan: Pump another $20 billion into the sickly, $200 billion behemoth “Future Combat Systems” before it drops dead under its own weight.
Future Combat Systems, or FCS, is the Army’s effort to use software and computer networks to turn itself into a quicker, lighter, more-lethal force by 2017. The vision is for fleets of new armored vehicles, ground robots and flying drones to be linked together by a wireless internet for combat, and by a common operating system. But FCS has been in trouble, almost since the day it began, with slipped deadlines, bloated budgets, unproven technologies and unrealistic expectations.
The picture may be even more bleak than has been previously been understood, however. A soon-to-be-released Government Accountability Office report, first obtained by Inside the Army, notes that FCS’ core software programs are now slated to take up 95 million lines of code, nearly triple the original estimate. Only two of Future Combat Systems’ 44 key technologies are where they should have been — at the beginning of the program. Things are so bad that the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative arm, is now recommending that the Pentagon start “identify[ing] viable alternatives to FCS.” That’s government-speak for chopping the program into bits, and starting over again. And the Department of Defense “concur[s] with [those] recommendations,” according to the study.
The GAO report shows that “there is no way they stay on schedule without major reductions… due to lagging key technologies and the program’s wildly optimistic integration assumptions, which are based on faith, not reality,” a congressional source tells Inside the Army.
But while the GAO, congress’ investigative arm, is warning of Future Combat Systems’ possible demise, Murtha is looking to speed the program up — and give it an extra $20 billion.
Murtha is also worried about FCS’ long-term health. And he’s concerned that, by the time 2017 rolls around, the country won’t have the stomach to pay for all the networked vehicles that are at the heart of the program. “[The Army] is doing it so slowly that they never get there,” he said last month. “I mean, they have no plan. I said you’ve got to take some risks, you’ve got to cut some stuff out.”
So Murtha is trying to work out a deal with the Army. The service “must complete FCS in 4-5 years,” according to a memo obtained by Inside the Army. And Murtha is “willing to find $20 billion this year for FCS if we can accelerate” the program. “Chairman Murtha mentioned several times that he has $300 billion to ‘play with,’” the memo adds. The Army is now working on plans that would take Murtha’s offer into account.
Read the full article by Noah Shachtman at Wired.
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Adding 20 billion will slow the program down further. If they want to speed things up and end up with a viable system, cutting 20-40 billion and forcing those involved to make do would would do the trick. Integrated systems development project management 101.
Of course, expecting anything designed from the ground up by a enormous committee composed of government employees and carried out by contractors was guaranteed to be a clusterf-ck. Just look at the Flight Control Systems debacle(s).
March 10th, 2008 at 5:00 pmWas this contractor on the list of contractors who paid thousands of dollars to honor Congressman Murtha in Washington recently?
Why no criminal investigation into this?
This is one of the things I agree with Sen. McCain.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:47 pmMurtha is involved? Fuck that, the bastard is feathering his and relatives nests somehow. I’m with West on this one. Cut pork. That’s Jackass Murthurfuggah’s gravey.
March 10th, 2008 at 6:06 pmWanna bet that FCS is running on Windoze??
March 10th, 2008 at 7:08 pmHire Steve Jobs to make an army I phone that plugs into every system.
March 10th, 2008 at 10:46 pmActually, FCS is a Unix based system. And, it has never worked as proposed.
The problem? A different company building each individual piece and writing their own code.
Funny story, so we were fielding AFATDS at my unit in 1998-1999 and as part of this fielding we were to demonstrate its compatibility with the JSTARS Common Ground Station to the CG. So, contact teams from each system’s manufacturer show up to guide us and the Air Force guys through the process and guess what! These “experts” had no idea how to make them talk to each other. In fact, their compatibility had NEVER been tested! All the Army did was give each company a set of parameters to adhere to then said go at it!
Well, after a week a testing multiple different set-ups and parameters, we finally got these 2 computers to eventually do what Yahoo messenger had been doing for years. We could send text messages and very basic target info (location, type) but not the loads of data that the system was purported to be capable of.
March 11th, 2008 at 5:25 am