Noah Shachtman
Wired
March 10, 2008

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.

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