The Army identified six capability sets it will need to fight future conflicts, but neither its acquisition system, nor its program management structure, is designed to deliver those technologies, according to Gen. David Perkins, chief of Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
Instead of tanks, helicopters and artillery, the Army must distance itself from buying “things” to fight wars and, instead, invest in capabilities that can deliver long-term technological superiority, Perkins said Monday during TRADOC’s Mad Scientist Conference at Georgetown University in Washington.
Commander Army Training and Doctrine Command
Photo: TRADOC
The so-called “Big 6 Plus 1” includes future vertical lift aircraft, combat vehicles, cross-domain fires, advanced protection systems (APS), expeditionary mission command/cyber and electromagnetic and robotics/autonomous systems. The “Plus 1” underpinning the whole construct is soldier and team performance.
“These are round pegs, but our acquisition process, our funding process, they are square holes,” Perkins said. “We don’t have POMs and acquisition processes for capabilities. We acquire things. We have a program manager for the tank. We have a program manager for the helicopter. We have program managers for things. … The future is less about any specific thing and is more about an overall capability. The problem is we are not really organized to think about capabilities.”
In the 1970s, the Army launched the “Big 5” modernization campaign that resulted in the legacy vehicles and systems that form the service’s operational core: the M-1 Abrams tank, Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, UH-60 Black Hawk utility helicopter and the Patriot missile defense system.
“The difference here is these are not things,” Perkins said. “It’s not things like the M-1 tank or the Apache, which are great things. I love them all…We’ve said these are capabilities that as we look to 2040-2050, will probably be pretty critical.”
Though an unassailable success, Perkins said the Big 5 represented an outmoded way of buying weapons that cannot hold in the modern threat environment where technology progresses much faster than the government can design and build vehicles. A brand-new tank that costs billions of dollars to develop and procure in sufficient numbers can be quickly defeated by a relatively inexpensive and incremental improvement in anti-tank guided missiles and in much less time, Perkins said.
Perkins singled out advanced protection systems (APS) as an example of investing in capabilities instead of buying specific systems. A former armor officer, Perkins said he learned protection comes from heavy armor, in thicker and thicker layers.
“The problem we’re seeing now is, with the proliferation of ATGMs and chemical energy munitions, shaped charges and stuff like that, is that the cost curve as well as the physics is working against us,” Perkins said. “It’s much easier to develop new ways to penetrate the armor. … The adversary can update their capability much quicker than we can, much less expensively than we can.”
The Army risks significant sunk cost after outfitting a whole army with a new armored vehicle. An enemy needs only to develop a slightly better ATGM and those vehicles “have all become somewhat less relevant.”
“As we look at our weapon systems and our capabilities, I have got to think of a different way to protect … vehicles. … I have to stop hard-wiring capabilities into my systems. They have to be things that don’t become irrelevant too quickly. I have to be able to update it just as quickly as the threat can update.”