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Gates: Cutting FCS was tough

Defense Secretary Robert Gates wants the Army to lay out its plan for new combat vehicles that can protect soldiers from roadside bombs, and wants Pentagon buyers and industry to shift from “exquisite” systems to ones affordable in large numbers.

A day after rolling out a 2010 Pentagon spending plan that he calls “a reform budget,” Gates told a group of reporters that the decision to shrink the Future Combat System (FCS) program and kill all eight planned vehicles “was the last … and hardest decision” he made in fashioning the sweeping plan.

Senior defense officials worried that the vehicles would cost too much and require too much modification to withstand the lethal bombs used against U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gates said.

The secretary, who said the FCS decision was made with the involvement of Army leaders, worried that “a program that was first designed nine years ago had not fully integrated lessons” gleaned in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He said program officials made some tradeoffs in designing the vehicles that concerned him, including adding “situational awareness capability” instead of armor. Gates said he also was worried that the Infantry Fighting Vehicle (IFV) would have had a flat bottom and an 18-inch underbelly height, leaving them vulnerable to IEDs.

The V-shaped hulls of MRAPs, which Gates pushed to send to Iraq, push blast energy away from the cabin.

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who also met with journalists at the Pentagon, said officials concluded that adding the requisite armor and other components would have strained the FCS vehicles’ suspensions.

“You would have needed to heavy up something that was not built to take on that [much] weight,” he said.

Gates and Cartwright said they support the eventual purchase of a new generation of Army ground vehicles that “incorporate the lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan,” as Gates said.

Amphibious study

The secretary said he wants the upcoming 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review to look at “how much” amphibious capability the military likely will need in the future.

“We need some; the question is how much,” he said.

The amphibious study will inform decisions on what to do with several programs, such as the Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, as well as the Navy’s LPD-17 transport ship and the Mobile Landing Platform programs.

Despite its programmatic troubles, Gates said the EFV program “will continue as-is,” pending the outcomes of the amphibious review.

Air war

Asked about his decision to cap F-22 production at 187 jets and speed F-35 production, the duo said they decided it would be better “for the nation” to have a fleet of “exquisite” Raptors “backed up by” a larger number of F-35s and unmanned aircraft like Predators and Reapers.

The general said industry and the services must shift their plans away from expensive weapons like the F-22 and DDG 1000 destroyer and toward cheaper ones such as the F-35 and Littoral Combat Ship.

He said the future of the military’s tactical aircraft will be F-35s and UAVs like the Predator and Reaper.

Gates sent his spending plan to the Office of Management of Budget “about the same time” he briefed reporters on Monday. He said he got Obama’s approval to do the public rollout so he could provide the nation with “the proper context” of all the moves.

Gates’ cuts aimed to make room in the Pentagon budget for other priorities, especially intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance assets and special operations gear. Gates also is trying to “give a seat at the [budget] table” to capabilities and entities aimed at irregular, hybrid and cyber threats, not just conventional ones.

He told reporters that he wants those items inserted into service budgets, making them important to annual service top-line budget figures.

“And we all know how good the services are at defending their budget requests,” Gates said with a grin.

Sources have said senior Air Force officials lobbied Gates for up to 265 F-22s.

When pressed during the Tuesday roundtable, however, Gates repeated his Monday assertion that military commanders and air service officials assured him only 187 jets were needed.

The plan signals the Obama administration’s desire to stop buying several weapons, including the F-22 fighter; terminate others, such as the Transformational Satellite; limit several, such as FCS and the DDG 1000 destroyer; and put off a final decision for others, such as a new Air Force long-range bomber, pending the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review.

The 2010 budget also will seek to buy more F/A-18 fighters, Advanced Extremely High Frequency satellites and DDG 51 destroyers.