By Marina Malenic
The Army will not include funding for several parts of its massive modernization effort, the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, in its next five-year spending plan, an Army source tells Defense Daily.
The service has organized the $160 billion program into “spin outs,” whereby individual technologies will be fielded in small groupings as they mature. Three spin outs are currently planned, but the Army will only include funding for two of those in a pending budget document, according to the Army source.
“Spin Out 2 is currently not funded in the POM,” the source said last week, referring to the Program Objective Memorandum, a five-year outlook on budget requirements. The services are expected to submit their latest POM requests (POM ’10) to Defense Secretary Robert Gates later this month.
Last month, senior Army leaders announced a restructure of the FCS program that would compress the test schedule and field the first FCS technologies–Spin Out 1–to Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (IBCTs) rather than Heavy BCTs, as originally planned. Service leaders said the cost of the program would not increase as a result of the changes (Defense Daily, June 26).
Spin Out 1 includes Joint Tactical Radio System Ground Mobile Radios (JTRS GMR); Integrated Computer System and Battle Command software; Tactical and Urban Unattended Ground Sensors (T-UGS and U-UGS); the Non-Line of Sight Launch System (NLOS LS); the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle (SUGV); and the Class 1 Unmanned Air Vehicle.
Spin Out 2 includes an Active Protection System (APS) and a mast-mounted sensor, both of which had been intended for use on Stryker vehicles. Spin Out 3 is funded in POM ’10, according to the source, but its content remains undecided.
A source familiar with the program said the Army is still examining potential changes to its structure–including a more gradual phase-in of the Manned Ground Vehicles (MGVs), a division of the program into separate elements, and even deferral of the delivery date for “pure” FCS brigades far into the future.
The service plans to dedicate less than four percent of its procurement budget to FCS for at least the next five years, Army Secretary Pete Geren said on Thursday.
“In this POM, it never gets to be more than four percent of our procurement cut,” Geren said at an AUSA Institute for Land Warfare event.
The Army will, however, have to request permission to reprogram Fiscal Year 2008 and possibly FY ’09 funds to accommodate the changes announced last month, according to the Army source. A request to reprogram $19 million for changes to NLOS LS has been introduced on Capitol Hill, and another request for some $200 million to fund the acceleration could be submitted in the coming months, according to the source.
Congress earlier this year rejected a similar request.