Balancing Technology and Risk in the Future Combat Systems

While all the lessons of Operation Iraqi Freedom will not be known for some time, one already seems clear: large, well-armed ground forces are still needed for many expeditionary wars. Heavy U.S. Army forces, however, still lack the capacity to deploy overseas swiftly enough to wage these wars. The result is a deficiency in the capacity of U.S. military forces to prosecute modern wars in distant areas. This will be especially true for wars in which air power is not a cure-all and major ground combat operations must be launched. Addressing the problem of slow Army deployment rates, the Army Transformation Roadmap 2003 states the goal of transformation is to "identify and build required capabilities now...while developing future force capabilities essential to provide relevant, ready, responsive, and dominant land power to the Future Joint Force." Indeed, one aspect of the Army's transformation efforts is force redesign to develop an active component capable of deploying a responsive, agile expeditionary force in the first fifteen days of an operation. Presently, much of the tonnage devoted to Army assets must be shipped by sea because the capacity of U.S. strategic airlift is insufficient to complete the task. Consider that each cargo ship must be individually loaded at ports in the continental United States, sailed thousands of miles, and offloaded at foreign ports. Loading and offloading a single cargo ship alone can take two or three days. For obvious reasons, this process can be quite timeconsuming. If bottlenecks arise, such as a shortage of cargo ships or poor offloading facilities at foreign ports, the process can be considerably delayed. This reliance on slow-moving cargo ships to transport weighty forces lies at the heart of the Army’s deployment problem. How the Army achieves its transformational goal of rapid deployment depends upon its perspectives about weight. That is, transformation plans differ if the objective is weight reduction as opposed to weight redistribution. Weight reduction is primarily platformcentric and relies upon technological advances in materials and network technology to deliver a single lightweight platform capable of surviving heavy combat. Weight redistribution considers parameters other than platform weight and information to meet the Army's goals, to wit, forces are re-structured into small, modular units, pre-positioned across the globe, and deployed in a time-sequential manner. Although the second approach is less dependent upon technology, it is possible only if Army forces are considered malleable in time, space, and structure. In Sections 2 and 3 we consider the technological advances necessary to realize transformation based on weight reduction and in Section 4 we consider weight redistribution. Section 5 contains some final thoughts and recommendations regarding Army transformation.