Fantasy Combat System

David Axe (one of the presenters on my DHS Blogging on Science panel this Wednesday) relays a good article from GovExec on the Army’s Fantasy, er, Future Combat System:

Super-reporter Greg Grant has a kickass piece in GovExec about the Army’s ambitious but fundamentally flawed Future Combat Systems, a $200-billion networked combination of sensors, robots and new lightly armored ground vehicles that Winslow Wheeler from the Center for Defense Information calls a “money-guzzling fantasy of the wizards of the so-called ‘revolution in military affairs.’” Grant argues that FCS grew not out of genuine need for new equipment, but out of “a political battle for taxpayer dollars with the Air Force and Navy in the late 1990s, when the military embraced a questionable vision of warfare fought from a distance with sensors and precision munitions” mounted on thin-skinned, more mobile vehicles.

Of course, we already know that knowing where the tanks aren’t don’t help when a kid is popping around a corner or rooftop and firing off an RPG… nor does it help when the war is more about information and “propaganda” victories and less about taking out often non-existent command and control.

Posted in War