A decade after the cold war ended, the Army recognized that its combat force was not well suited to perform the operations it faces today and is likely to face in the future. The Army’s heavy forces had the necessary firepower but required extensive support and too much time to deploy. Its light forces could deploy rapidly but lacked firepower. To address this mismatch, the Army decided to radically transform itself into a new “Future Force.” The Army expects the Future Force to be organized, manned, equipped, and trained for prompt and sustained land combat. This translates into a force that is responsive, technologically advanced, and versatile. These qualities are intended to ensure the Future Force’s long-term dominance over evolving, sophisticated threats. The Future Force is to be offensively oriented and will employ revolutionary operational concepts, enabled by new technology. This force is to fight very differently than the Army has in the past, using easily transportable lightweight vehicles, rather than traditional heavily armored vehicles. The Army envisions a new way of fighting that depends on networking the force, which involves linking people, platforms, weapons, and sensors seamlessly together. The Army has determined that it needs more agile forces. Agile forces would possess the ability to seamlessly and quickly transition among various types of operations, from support operations to warfighting and back again. They would adapt faster than the enemy, thereby denying it the initiative. Agile forces would allow commanders of small units the authority and high quality information to act quickly to respond to dynamic situations. To be successful, therefore, the transformation must include more than new weapons. It must be extensive, encompassing tactics and doctrine as well as the very culture and organization of the Army. FCS will provide the majority of weapons and sensor platforms that composes the new brigade-like modular units of the Future Force known as Units of Action. Each unit is to be a rapidly deployable fighting organization about the size of a current Army brigade but with the combat power and lethality of the current larger division. The Army also expects FCS-equipped units of action to provide significant warfighting capabilities to the overall joint force. The Army is reorganizing its current forces into modular, brigade-based units akin to units of action. FCS is a family of 18 manned and unmanned ground vehicles, air vehicles, sensors, and munitions that will be linked by an information network. These include, among other things, eight new ground vehicles to replace current vehicles such as tanks, infantry carriers and self-propelled howitzers, four different unmanned aerial vehicles, several unmanned ground vehicles, and attack missiles that can be positioned in a box-like structure. The manned ground vehicles are to be a fraction of the weight of current weapons such as the Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle, yet are to be as lethal and survivable. At a fundamental level, the FCS concept is replacing mass with superior information; that is, to see and hit the enemy first, rather than to rely on heavy armor to withstand a hit. The essence of the FCS concept itself—to provide the lethality and survivability of the current heavy force with the sustainability and responsiveness of a force that weighs a fraction as much—has the intrinsic attraction of doing more with less. The FCS concept has a number of progressive features, that demonstrate the Army’s desire to be proactive in its approach to preparing for potential future conflicts and its willingness to break with tradition in developing an appropriate response to the changing scope of modern warfare. If successful, the program will leverage individual capabilities of weapons and platforms and will facilitate interoperability and open system designs. This is a significant improvement over the traditional approach of building superior individual weapons that must be netted together after the fact. Also, the system-of- systems network and weapons could give managers the flexibility to make best value tradeoffs across traditional program lines. This transformation of the Army, 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 collaborative relationship between the developer (program manager), the contractor, and the warfighter community. The FCS program was approved to start system development and demonstration in May 2003. On July 21, 2004, the Army announced its plans to restructure the program. The restructuring responded to direction from the Army Chief of Staff and addresses risks and other issues identified by external analyses. Its objectives include: Spinning off ripe FCS capabilities to current force units; Meeting Congressional language for fielding the Non-Line of Sight Cannon; Retaining the system-of-systems focus and fielding all 18 systems; Increasing the overall schedule by 4 years; and Developing a dedicated evaluation unit to demonstrate FCS capabilities The program restructuring contained several features that reduce risk— adding 4 additional years to develop and mature the manned ground vehicles, adding demonstrations and experimentation, and establishing an evaluation unit to demonstrate FCS capabilities. The program restructuring also adds scope to the program by reintroducing four deferred systems, adding four discrete spirals of FCS capabilities to the current force, and accelerating the development of the network. About $6.1 billion was added to the system development and demonstration contract and the Army has recently announced that the detailed revision of the contract has been completed. To develop the information on whether the FCS program was following a knowledge-based acquisition strategy and the current status of that strategy, we interviewed officials of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense (Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics); the Secretary of Defense’s Cost Analysis Improvement Group; the Assistant Secretary of the Army (Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology); the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command; Surface Deployment and Distribution Command; the Program Manager for the Unit of Action (previously known as Future Combat Systems); the Future Combat Systems Lead Systems Integrator; and LSI One Team contractors. We reviewed, among other documents, the Future Combat Systems’ Operational Requirements Document, the Acquisition Strategy Report, the Baseline Cost Report, the Critical Technology Assessment and Technology Risk Mitigation Plans, and the Integrated Master Schedule. We attended the FCS Management Quarterly Reviews, In-Process Reviews, and Board of Directors Reviews. In our assessment of the FCS, we used the knowledge-based acquisition practices drawn from our large body of past work as well as DOD’s acquisition policy and the experiences of other programs. We discussed the issues presented in this statement with officials from the Army and the Secretary of Defense, and made several changes as a result. We performed our review from May 2004 to March 2005 in accordance with generally accepted auditing standards. The FCS program faces significant challenges in setting requirements, developing systems, financing development, and managing the effort. It is the largest and most complex acquisition ever attempted by the Army. The Army wants the FCS-equipped unit of action to be as lethal and survivable as the current heavy force, but to be significantly more responsive and sustainable. For the unit of action to be lethal, it must have the capability to address the combat situation, set conditions, maneuver to positions of advantage, and engage enemy formations at longer ranges and with greater precision than the current force. To provide this level of lethality and reduce the risk of detection, FCS must provide high single- shot weapon effectiveness. To be as survivable as the current heavy force, the unit of action must find and kill the enemy before being seen and identified. The individual FCS systems will also rely on a layered system of protection involving several technologies that lowers the chances of a vehicle or other system being seen and hit by the enemy. To be responsive, the unit of action must be able to rapidly deploy anywhere in the world and be rapidly transportable by various means—particularly by the C-130 aircraft—and ready to fight upon arrival. To facilitate rapid transportability on the battlefield, FCS vehicles are to match the weight and size constraints of the C-130 aircraft. The unit of action is to be capable of sustaining itself for periods of 3 to 7 days, depending on the level of conflict—necessitating a small logistics footprint. This requires subsystems with high reliability and low maintenance, reduced demand for fuel and water, highly effective weapons, and fuel-efficient engines. Meeting all these requirements is unprecedented not only because of the difficulty each represents individually, but because the solution for one requirement may work against another requirement. For example, solutions for lethality could increase vehicle weight and size. Solutions for survivability could increase complexity and lower reliability. It is the performance of the information network that is the linchpin for meeting the other requirements. It is the quality and speed of the information that will enable the lethality and survivability of smaller vehicles. It is smaller vehicles that enable responsiveness and sustainability. In the Army’s own words, the FCS is “the greatest technology and integration challenge the Army has ever undertaken.” The Army intends to concurrently develop a complex, system-of-systems–an extensive information network and 18 major weapon systems. The sheer scope of the technological leap required for the FCS involves many elements. For example: A first-of-a-kind network will have to be developed that will entail development of unprecedented capabilities—on-the-move communications, high-speed data transmission, dramatically increased bandwidth, and simultaneous voice, data and video; The design and integration of 18 major weapon systems or platforms has to be done simultaneously and within strict size and weight limitations; At least 53 technologies that are considered critical to achieving FCS’ critical performance capabilities will need to be matured and integrated into the system-of-systems; Synchronizing the development, demonstration, and production of as many as 157 complementary systems with the FCS content and schedule.