Comments on: Army’s New Mod Plan Under Fire

By: Bill R.

Bill R. — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:42:57 +0000

There is no sense of urgency at any level anymore. The Army cancels programs like they were going out of style: Future Force Warrior, Commanche, Crusader, Armored Gun System, 13 of of the original 18 FCS systems — all of these programs had to be justified by formal analysis of alternatives and definition of operational requirements. The attitude coming through now, is “I don’t care if I need it, just make sure it works” Yes, the Sheridan and the M-16 rifle were crap systems that should never have been fielded. Problems with the Stryker ? Imagine that. Nobody shed a tear when SINCGARS replaced the VRC-12 radio. But we aren’t even bringing systems to test before canceling them anymore.

By: MAJ Kareem Williams

MAJ Kareem Williams — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:58:01 +0000

I think that we have to provide some kind of capability that FCS was going to provide. DoD has spent too much time and money trying to develop new and innoative technology for our future battles. Provide some of the capabilities is better then not providing our Soldiers with any of them. Test Fix Test is a concept that has to be done. Soldiers test the equipment so that the program manager know if the system will work in the field, why field a piece of equipment that has not been tested…that will be even more of a waste of time.

By: Bill R.

Bill R. — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:15:50 +0000

Hyberbole doesn’t help us here. I really think the Army has gone into sour grapes mode on this thing, but it was the Army, not the contractor that made up the acquisition strategy and it was the Army that put all its force modernization eggs in one basket. Truth is that creative destruction is just destruction when it comes to combat developments. I had one young captain say to me that he would like all the simulations to use a “Command and Conquer” interface. But war is not a video game, and I will look on in horror when they try to bring CJMTK back and make it work on a tactical C2 system. Just make it work in Windows so it is easy as email, right ? yeah.…

By: Gumps

Gumps — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 02:09:25 +0000

The program has been poorly planned and executed from the get-go. The software is probably the most brittle and unstable ever deployed. Start with SOSCOE — a bad idea that’s been tried before in other industries. The bloated middleware has been under development for over 6 years and is a crap. Then there’s the user interface (WMI) — I’ve seen much better interfaces in arcade video games. And for the millions of lines of code, what was delivered? The ability to control some unmanned sensors and Irobot’s SUGV — big deal. the best thing that should happen is to drive a wooden stake through the heart of this program. But it won’t happen. I guess it’s human nature to admit defeat when so much $$ and resources have been squandered… Where’s John McCain when you need him?

By: Bill R.

Bill R. — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:49:45 +0000

By now, there has been a field experiment, four technical field tests and two limited user tests of this same equipment, so I think it is piling on to complain about having to fuel the Class I up all the time (Surprise — you mean you have to put gas in the thing — why didn’t we think about that before ???) or that it “makes too much noise”. Operational use is what its all about, and if the green suiters haven’t thought through that stuff by now, sorry on ‘em.

By: Bill R.

Bill R. — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:49:35 +0000

Actually, FCS started with a cluster of DARPA programs that were bundled together and transitioned to Army control. It started out as a joint DARPA-Army program, but the green suiters were too impatient to let the program take its course. First DARPA went away, then they restructured the program into an incremental process baseline. Then they eliminated government-industry cost sharing by converting the contract vehicle from a Other Transaction Agreement to a standard FAR contract. And since the government pays itself first, they kept the program management and government lab support at the previous baseline, but there was nothing to replace what the LSI and subcontractors promised. Then the program took 5–10% reductions each year and the timelines kept moving 6–12 months to the right. GAO has no right to complain now, because they were the henchmen who helped shortsheet this program in the first place.

By: Bill R.

Bill R. — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:35:11 +0000

Try that approach against the Chinese Army, sir. Or any organized military force for that matter. Today’s warfighters take too much for granted.

By: Bill R.

Bill R. — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:33:27 +0000

Sorry — your facts are wrong. MULE-T is history. Out of the baseline. Cancelled. Are you happy now ? I’m told that reason MULE-T got thrown under the bus was because it was designed as a follower platform to the manned FCS vehicles, so when the MGV went away, MULE-T went into the zone of vulnerability. But this “light fighter” mania has gone far enough. The Army is not one big Ranger regiment, even if they do all wear black hats now.

By: UH34D

UH34D — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:40:35 +0000

I haven’t read all of the comments here so this may have been mentioned already. Why don’t these companies first go and ask the troops what they need and start from there? Most of these programs are initiated by a company, they design some gadget and then bring it to the troops after the fact. These companies are always developing and building and then demonstrate their concept to the military. I say let the company execs go into the field with troops, observe, evaluate and then decide with the troops what products will actually help the troops get the job done.

S/F Gordon

By: BOOMER

BOOMER — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:58:29 +0000

CONTINUED: This is also why they geniously came up with standard deviations, velocities and preassures may be well outside of the requirements and all over the scale, but standard deviation when all are combined makes it acceptable (averages it out instead of being consistent). that is why to be acceptable it has to shoot with 14″ at 1000 yards (yet we expect our operators to be able to hit a man in the heart every time at 1000 yds). That is why Most operators wont even use this ammo on ops even though we are buying the heck out of it. Big point is we need better more percise language in contracts to prevent this from happening as it does in all programs.

By: BOOMER

BOOMER — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:58:04 +0000

There is no clarification in specs on a lot of equipment either, the requirements are there but not clarified enough to keep the contractor to reading in to them in thier favor. Take for exapmple M118 Long range sniper ammo. The spec list two different bullet weights, three different powder wieghts, minimum and maximum case diameters and lengths. Now common sense would tell you that for a lot of ammunition you want the exact same bullet weight, powder wieght, and case demension in every round to maintain constant accuracy, you have the different weights because every rifle shoots different and you want to be able to select the ammo that shoots best for that rifle. But because it does not state this in the specs the contractor uses the whole gammit of weights and lengths in an ammo lot arguing thats what the spec calls for and thats what you got.

By: BOOMER

BOOMER — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 13:39:17 +0000

The govt does buy junk for sure. I ran into an ARMY unit lost in a valley in Afganistan because thier squad leaders GPS failed, none were carrying a compass or had a clue how to navigate by a map (they were all young and green). But they should had been trained better in the basics of navigation rather than being dependent on technology. On another occasion a co worker of mine was witnessing a GPS fire control system that just would not work, kept giving false readings that the techs blamed on the heavy cloud cover so my friend went and got his $400.00 MAGELIN out of his rental car and proved the technicians wrong. They were pretty embarrassed thier $500,000.00 GPS system was put to shame by a off the shelf item. Bad trhing is even though everyone read his report and laughed about it they spent more money on the program anyways. Most PM’s wont admitt they are on a worthless project because they dont want to risk being placed back under someone else if thier program gets cancelled so they find more funding and ways to get it fielded even if it is a bad ideal.

By: SNAFU

SNAFU — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:21:51 +0000

Test-fix-test… They will do that for eternity. The software is brittle, and is the most unreliable I have ever experienced. The CL-I UAV can be defeated with a well thrown rock, and the unmanned sensors are a joke.

By: x man

x man — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 17:24:15 +0000

x-man
It is the WNW waveform that is the most troublsome, not the current force waveforms such as SINCGARS and EPLRS. When we tested the version 1x JTRS radios the WNW waveform had a threshold of –77dbm (10% packet error rate) with about 3 watts of output power (into antenna). It is the OFDM waveform that creates spurious sideband noise due to the nonlinearity of the power amplifier.

By: HasBeen

HasBeen — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:18:48 +0000

Mostly you need smart people doing the evaluations — and not solely people from the military or from industry. The military and industry muckety-mucks are sorta inbred and just don’t get it when their systems obviously don’t work.

First time I saw a picture of the ACU (long before it was fielded) I considered it to be lousy camo. I’ve yet to see it in an environment where I thought it worked well. Thing is that it was obvious all along that it was bad but it was fielded anyway. The only thing I could figure was that they thought that since it was mediocre everywhere that it was great.

Similar with the Army GPS systems we were given. Everyone who could tried to buy their own on the civilian market rather than use the overly complex, huge, heavy, and odd-battery requiring things the Army bought. Everyone with brains knew they were lousy and the Army bought them and gave them to us anyway. Pretty ridiculous when the PX in Afghanistan was selling better equipment than the Army was fielding.

If the UAS noted above was difficult to re-fuel and noisy, then that should have been apparent to even the people developing it and those who evaluated it. But you get pre-set requirements for the equipment and even if it is obviously lousy — it meets the official requirements so it’s good to go?

Too much of the stupid stuff that gets fielded is obviously stupid. Fire the idiots that buy the stupid stuff and you’ll be miles ahead.

By: HAZMAT 77

HAZMAT 77 — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 22:09:40 +0000

I agree wholeheartedly with Jeff N. The services need to select sets of requirements that meet the mission needs and then leave the them alone. Having to design systems to changing sets of requirements is a beautiful way to waste money. This is the reason we hear about systems that cost multiples of what they should. It is not the designing that wastes the majority of the money it is the constant re-designing.

By: Bubba

Bubba — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:17:18 +0000

For what its worth, the 9th ID "experiment" produced the Avenger weapon system. A hand ful of guys went to one of the "seminar/working groups" that periodically met at Ft Lewis. They "heard" the end-users complaint about mobility of SHORAD assets. 10 months later they showed up at Yakima with the Avenger proto-type. Its APU was a Honda generator. On their first run down the range road (in the rain and on the move) they successfully engage a Ballistic Aerial Target (BAT - and no, I don't know which generation but it was 1984) and the "test" was scored as a "hit." All of the above is to say that there is a point to prototyping. Yup, "test-fix-test" is always expensive; if you don't think so ask the pharmaceutical companies. But before you decide that veryone can get along like the guys in SOCOM do - and they are awe-inspiring on their mediocre days - remeber the cost of getting those guys to the level where they can "improvise" with one-off type equipment! There is no free lunch out there, troops!

By: nraddin

nraddin — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:59:52 +0000

If the Army really wanted to do a “buy less, more often” approach and make it work then they should start with one brigade (See they did that), give them what they got and let them take it to action. Then use what they hear from that brigade about the equipment to update and fix, then field to two brigades (Different Brigades) about 12 to 18 months later. Take what they learn from that brigade, update and fix, equip the next two or three brigades. ad nauseum.
In this way every 12 to 18 months another two or three brigade gets the newest greatest equipment. This would take about 15 to 20 years to rotate through all the brigades (~45) on an easy to plan and budget cycle. Support brigades should be done on a separate cycle from combat brigades but in a similar fashion focused on there support roll.
I could go on about how to incorporate feedback from the field and use the next brigades to be fielded for your testing and R&D while not cutting the big contractors out so much that you have a big fight on your hard over the change in Modus Operandi, how setting fixed budgets can allow for more innovative thinking and higher profits, or how this would add tools to the tool box faster but that’s not the point here. The point here is that all of there talk about changing the system is just talk with a little bit of Dog and Pony show out front to make it seem real.

By: Grunt36

Grunt36 — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 17:49:07 +0000

With all of this technology, all we are doing is wasting or money…One resource that has never failed this country or any other country or organization is boots on deck. No matter how hard you may try, you just cant replace the knowledge and the experience and the reliability of a man who is there in person and can make the decisions that need to be made at that moment at that spot. We just need to get the p[olitical and the press bull shit out of our way and we can go back to having a real war and end this conflict real quick fast and in a hurry.

“Kill them all let God sort them out”

By: BOOMER

BOOMER — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:42:52 +0000

CONT: Also take a look at trying to come up with the next gen of small arms. Warriors want time proven weapons and not new gimmicks untested in battle, I know I want something that has been through a few battles and uses readily accessible ammo, not some new plastic thing in a weird or caseless caliber, and I dont want 10lbs of electronics on my weapon that arwe useless when the battery dies on it. I dont want a 3lb tv cammera on my rifle, if the boss wants to see combat then he needs to bring his hind in up to the firing line with me. The one time we should be using COTS we dont, Better rifles — boots — packs –knives — and such are already on shelves but instead of buying them we want something different.