The last time the US Army tried to modernize it spent $20 billion buying the Future Combat System, which was cancelled as it foundered. Is the Army repeating the same mistakes with its Big Six?

“You’ve got to remain open to change, you’ve got to remain flexible, you’ve to remain accessible,” Army Secretary Mark Esper told me. “That is the purpose of this command.”

Army Futures Command is just a means to an end: modernizing the Army for high-intensity war against Russia or China. That includes replacing the iconic but aging M1 Abrams main battle tank, as well as other war machines, with an all-new Next Generation Combat Vehicle optimized for urban warfare, Army Chief of Staff Mark Milley told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

“You fix your roof when it’s sunny out, and right now it appears to be sunny for the next couple of years,” Esper said. “We have to do our best now to find those dollars so we can, again, apply them back to our priorities.”

“’20 and ’21 is where we need to make sure we don’t kind of hit turbulence,” McCarthy said. “The budget deal was great — we had an enormous increase, and we’re grateful for that — but this (sequestration) still looms.”

The Army’s modernization initiatives aren’t plunging into the valley of death this week or even, in most cases, this year. It will take time to build prototypes, to test them and to figure out how the force will make the most of new technology. But over the next few years, enough of these projects have to make it across that daunting gap to actually change the Army.

“If you start a process with an org chart, you’re toast,” Army Under Secretary Ryan McCarthy said. “Focus on what you want to achieve.”

The new combat vehicles must be “optimized for fighting in dense urban terrain.” Fighting in narrow streets, in turn, requires smaller vehicles than the massive M1 — and one way to reduce weight is to take the humans out.

The Army is studying 30 cities as possible sites for the Futures Command it’s standing up this summer — but the winning city may hardly notice.

This is the second op-ed we’ve run by serving Army officials about how and why the service should be restructured so it can build its next generation of weapons and do it effectively. The Army, not known for going public with its internal (sometimes religious) debates, appears to understand that after getting so much wrong… Keep reading →