The FCS concept is designed to be part of the Army’s Future Force, which is intended to transform the Army into a more rapidly deployable and responsive force that differs substantially from the large division-centric structure of the past. The Army is reorganizing its current forces into modular brigade combat teams, each of which is expected to be highly survivable and the most lethal brigade-sized unit the Army has ever fielded. The Army expects FCS-equipped brigade combat teams to provide significant warfighting capabilities to DOD’s overall joint military operations. The Army is implementing its transformation plans at a time when current U.S. ground forces continue to play a critical role in ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Army has instituted plans to spin out selected FCS technologies and systems to current Army forces throughout the program’s system development and demonstration phase. The Army recently made a number of adjustments to its plans for the FCS program. The revised program will no longer include all 18 systems as originally planned. The FCS family of weapons is now expected to include 14 manned and unmanned ground vehicles, air vehicles, sensors, and munitions that will be linked by an advanced information network. The systems include eight new types of manned ground vehicles to replace current tanks, infantry carriers, and self-propelled howitzers; two classes of unmanned aerial vehicles; several unmanned ground vehicles; and an attack missile. Fundamentally, the FCS concept is to replace mass with superior information—allowing the soldier to see and hit the enemy first rather to rely on heavy armor to withstand a hit. This proposed solution attempts to address a mismatch that has posed a dilemma to the Army for decades: the Army’s heavy forces had the necessary firepower needed to win but required extensive support and too much time to deploy while its light forces could deploy rapidly but lacked firepower. If the Future Force were to become a reality, then the Army would be better organized, staffed, equipped, and trained for prompt and sustained land combat, qualities intended to ensure that the Army would dominate over evolving, sophisticated threats. The Future Force is to be offensively oriented and will employ revolutionary concepts of operations, enabled by new technology. The Army envisions a new way of fighting that depends on networking the force, which involves linking people, platforms, weapons, and sensors seamlessly together in a system of systems. If successful, the FCS system-of-systems concept would integrate individual capabilities of weapons and platforms, thus facilitating interoperability and open system designs. This concept would represent significant improvement over the traditional approach of building superior individual weapons that must be retrofitted and netted together after the fact. This transformation, in terms of both operations and equipment, is under way with the full cooperation of the Army warfighter community. In fact, the development and acquisition of FCS is being accomplished using a uniquely collaborative relationship among the Army’s developers, the participating contractors, and the warfighter community. The Army is using a management approach for FCS that centers on an LSI to provide significant management services to help the Army define and develop FCS and reach across traditional Army mission areas. Because of its partner-like relationship with the Army, the LSI’s responsibilities include requirements development, design, and selection of major system and subsystem contractors. The team of Boeing and its subcontractor, Science Applications International Corporation, is the LSI for the FCS system development and demonstration phase of acquisition, which is expected to extend until 2017. The FCS LSI is expected to act on behalf of the Army to optimize the FCS capability, maximize competition, ensure interoperability, and maintain commonality in order to reduce life-cycle costs, and for overall integration of the information network. Boeing also acts as an FCS supplier in that it is responsible for developing two important software subsystems. Army representatives stated they did not believe the Army had the resources or flexibility to use its traditional acquisition process to field a program as complex as FCS under the aggressive timeline established by the then-Army Chief of Staff. The Army will maintain oversight and final approval of the LSI’s subcontracting and competition plans. In 2007, we reported on, among other things, why the Army decided to use an LSI for the FCS program and the nature of the LSI’s working relationship with the Army. We found that the use of an LSI for FCS provides an oversight challenge for the Army and that the Office of the Secretary of Defense has an important role in providing oversight on the FCS program. Congress has expressed concern over the use of LSI’s, and has prohibited DOD from awarding new contracts for LSI functions after October 2010. Since the mid-1990s, we have studied the best practices of leading commercial companies. Taking into account the differences between commercial product development and weapons acquisitions, we have articulated a best practices product development model that relies on increasing knowledge when developing a new product. This knowledge- based approach requires developers to make investment decisions on the basis of three specific, measurable levels of knowledge at critical junctures over the course of a program: Knowledge Point 1: At program start, the customer’s needs should match the developer’s available resources in terms of mature technologies, time, and funding. Indications of this match include having firm requirements in place as well as demonstrated maturity of technologies needed to meet customer needs. A preliminary design review at or near the start of product development is typically the vehicle used to help stabilize performance, schedule, and cost expectations. Knowledge Point 2: About midway through development, the product’s design should be stable and demonstrate that it is capable of meeting performance requirements. A critical design review at this mid-point is the vehicle for making the determination and generally signifies the point at which the program is ready to start building production- representative prototypes. Knowledge Point 3: By the time of the production decision, the product must be shown to be producible within cost, schedule, and quality targets and have demonstrated its reliability. It is also the point at which the design should demonstrate through realistic testing that it performs as expected. The most important part of a knowledge-based approach occurs at program start, when product development begins. At that point, a timely match of requirements and resources is critical to successful product development. A key difference between successful products—those that perform as expected and are developed within estimated resources—and problematic products is when the match is achieved. When a customer’s needs and a developer’s resources are matched before a product’s development starts, it is more likely the development will result in a successful product that is able to meet cost, schedule, and performance objectives. When this match takes place later, after the product development is underway, problems occur that can significantly increase the expected time and money as well as result in performance shortfalls. Because the Army went forward with FCS development before attaining key knowledge such as firm requirements and mature technologies, its knowledge levels have consistently lagged behind its calendar schedule. It will be a challenge for the Army to mature technologies and hold a preliminary design review by 2009. Ideally, these processes should have been completed by the program’s start in 2003. Moreover, the Army has just recently formed an understanding of what the FCS network needs to be and what may be technically feasible. The Army is still struggling to synchronize the set of needed complementary programs with FCS’s content and schedules because many of these programs have technical or funding issues of their own. As it has gained knowledge in these areas, the Army has had to restructure the program, reducing scope, increasing cost, and delaying schedule. In 2009, the Army will have spent 6 years and $18 billion on these initial definition and development efforts. That leaves about 4 years and $9 billion in development funding to complete what are usually the more costly aspects of a development program—system integration and demonstration activities as well as preparation for production. The Army’s user community believes, based on modeling and simulation analyses, that FCS will provide needed capabilities. However, it will be several years before demonstrations validate those results. In fact, system demonstrations to date have been limited and broad system-of- systems demonstrations will not be conducted until late in the program. Ideally, the Army should have shown a match between customer needs and available resources by having established firm requirements and preliminary designs that meet those requirements shortly after program start in 2003. Instead, the Army expects to continue the process of setting and defining requirements and establishing system designs at least until the program reaches its system-of-systems level preliminary design review in 2009. This is particularly problematic because 2009 actually marks a date that is about one year past the mid-point of the FCS development phase, when a program following best practices and DOD policy would normally conduct a critical design review to show it has a stable, producible design that is capable of meeting performance requirements. The Army faces a daunting task in completing requirements definition by 2009. As figure 2 illustrates, the FCS program encompasses thousands of requirements at the operational, system-of-systems, and individual system levels. The Army anticipates that it will gain a better understanding of FCS system and subsystem requirements--and resolve many of the remaining “to be determined” and open issues--during a series of system-level preliminary design reviews to be completed by February 2009. Army officials acknowledge that system-level requirements are almost certain to be modified in the process as subsystem hardware and software are more fully defined. The Army is working through the detailed requirements changes needed to implement the program adjustments announced in early 2007 because the restructure of FCS from 18 to 14 systems resulted in requirements modifications, deferral, and redistribution. Army officials told us they are currently assessing the requirements balance among the 14 systems and do not yet have all the modifications to system requirements in place. However, some consequences are already apparent.