Army officials seek to fend off Future Combat Systems cuts

Military and defense industry officials charged with developing the Army's massive Future Combat Systems today warned that annual congressional cuts in the $160 billion program ultimately could delay efforts to get new technologies to troops.

Congress has routinely trimmed hundreds of millions of dollars from the Pentagon's multibillion dollar requests for FCS, most recently cutting about $400 million from the program's fiscal 2007 budget request. So far, the cuts have resulted in only minor testing and other schedule delays, as officials have fenced off resources for the program's most critical accounts. But the "cumulative effect makes that more and more difficult every year," said Dennis Muilenburg, FCS program manager for Boeing Co., which is leading the industry effort on the program.

FCS, a complex system of manned and unmanned air and ground vehicles tied together by an expansive network, is the most expensive and ambitious technological endeavor in the Army's history.

To gain greater understanding and support for the program on Capitol Hill, program officials are encouraging congressional staffs to visit Army testing sites around the country to examine how far the program has come since the design and demonstration phase began more than three years ago.

"Come to Yuma. Come to White Sands," said Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, the Army's FCS program manager, referring to Army testing centers. "I've got 41 tests going on."

Indeed, the program, once considered a futuristic concept that existed only on briefing slides, has become more concrete, with the firing platform for the first of the manned ground vehicles, the Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon, undergoing testing.

"They're now coming to see real stuff," Cartwright said.

Over the last several years, Boeing has sprinkled FCS work among 232 congressional districts -- a tactic successfully used by the aerospace giant years ago to generate widespread congressional support for its C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane program. But FCS has not yet generated a consistent level of popular support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers continue to question whether the program can meet its lofty goals.

The Government Accountability Office, too, has raised concerns about program risks and officials' ability to manage the sprawling project. Tuesday, however, program officials attending the annual Washington meeting and exposition of the Association of the United States Army painted a positive picture of a healthy FCS program that is meeting its cost and schedule goals.

In the last year, officials have written millions of lines of software code and have completed a series of successful tests and reviews. The program, officials said, is on track to begin mass production of the first FCS technologies in 2010.