The Army is expected to release its modernization plan in the near future, reflecting priorities such as the Network and Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV), but if a program isn’t mentioned, it’s likely to be a low priority, according to a top service financial official.
“In our case it’s the dog that did not bark, so if you’ve not heard somebody mentioning a program in the last year or so–an Army leader–it may not be a priority said Maj. Gen. Thomas Spoehr, director, Program Analysis and Evaluation, Army G-8, at the Credit Suisse/McAleese Defense Programs Conference in Washington.
Army leaders have put programs and capability portfolios under “extraordinary scrutiny” and their “current inclination” is to move toward terminating those programs it can no longer afford. If something is not affordable, the program won’t be stretched out, it will be terminated and savings will be used to reinvest in higher priorities.
The soon to be unveiled modernization plan “acknowledges fiscal uncertainty,” he said, with a new strategy to “empower the soldier” with a mission command network, provide survivability and to remain lethal in decisive environments.
Meeting those goals includes buying GCV, “bought in a very modest quantity to assure we have what we need to protect our soldiers from the threat of improvised explosive devices,” he said.
Among the characteristics of the new Army modernization strategy are “smaller procurement quantities.” There will not be an objective of thousands of something that will take a decade to fulfill, but a finite quantity and “hopefully you can make that before the next budget hurricane hits.”
A second characteristic is “aligning our threshold requirements with what we believe technology can deliver,” Spoehr said.
In the past, objective requirements were laid out with the hope that technology levels could be reached in a couple of years. “We’ve been burned on that and we seek to avoid that type of thing.”
Cost effectiveness is another characteristic of the plan. “There’s no doubt in my mind that we can close any gap, but is it worth the money to close that gap or should we just let that gap go,” he said.
Something else that needs to happen is to move programs out of development as quickly as possible and into procurement. “The ones we have found that have spent the longest time in development are generally the least successful,” Spoehr said.
The Army considers mission command, the network and the GCV priorities, and believes it has support from the acquisition community and the Office of Secretary of Defense.
“I don’t think there’s any particular financial reason to think they’re any more protected than any other program, (but) that they represent Army priorities and OSD (Office of the Secretary of Defense) support,” he said of the network and GCV programs.
The Army has reconciled programs such as GCV and Stryker, and aviation programs “with what we think our financial forecast would be” so what the service recommends is reasonable in light of the current forecast, “even as far out as 2030,” he said. That presumes current fiscal forecasts are correct, he added.
Other programs likely to move forward could include the Armored Multi-purpose Vehicle (AMPV)–a priority because the M113, around since the 1950s, is “unsurvivable,” and doesn’t have the power needs of the current force, he said.
Additionally, engineering change proposals for Stryker would likely go forward if they are relevant for the long term.
Broadly, Spoehr said, “Army buying power is going down. With sequestration it goes down precipitously even without sequestration it goes down…”