With FCS, the Army embraced a new warfighting concept designed to replace most of its existing combat systems with a family of manned and unmanned vehicles and systems linked by an advanced information network. According to the Army, FCS represented the greatest technology and integration challenge it had ever undertaken—an FCS-equipped force was to be as lethal and survivable as today’s force, but significantly lighter and thus easier to both move and sustain. The Army determined it could not meet the challenges of the FCS scope and schedule with its workforce alone and with traditional management approaches. In 2003, the Army contracted with the Boeing Company as the lead systems integrator (LSI) to assist in defining, developing, and integrating FCS systems. Boeing subcontracted with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) to assist in performing the LSI functions. Over the past several years, Congress, GAO, and other organizations have expressed numerous concerns about the management and acquisition strategy for the FCS program, including significant knowledge gaps, questionable costs and affordability, the relationship between the Army and the LSI, and the lack of oversight by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD). This committee has been influential in overseeing the FCS program and protecting the government’s interests therein. In particular, the committee advocated changes to the original contract structure and type to incorporate more Federal Acquisition Regulation provisions, including those related to the Truth-in-Negotiations Act and the Procurement Integrity Act. This statement is based on work we conducted over the last several years in accordance with generally accepted government auditing standards. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain sufficient, appropriate evidence to provide a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. We believe the evidence obtained provides a reasonable basis for our findings and conclusions based on our audit objectives. There is no question the Army needs to ensure its forces are well- equipped. The Army has vigorously pursued FCS as the solution, a concept and an approach that is unconventional, yet with many good features that should be considered in future efforts. These features include a holistic, system-of-systems architectural vision, government insight into subcontractor selection and management, a focus on leveraging capabilities through an information network, and establishing organizations to train with and evaluate FCS-related spin-out technologies being provided to current forces. FCS resulted from Army leadership’s vision of how land forces should be organized, equipped, and trained to fight in the future. The decisions to pursue FCS, along with modular combat units, became the centerpiece for realizing this vision. To the Army’s credit, these decisions were harder than just replacing current combat systems, like the Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle, with new versions. Rather, Army leadership saw FCS as breaking with tradition. It was to be a system of systems—an overall architecture through which the collective capabilities of individual systems, both manned and unmanned, would be multiplied because of the synergistic effect of being linked by an advanced information network. Individual systems were to be designed to work within the architecture and the network—an improvement over a traditional, system-centric design approach that would integrate the systems after the fact. Army leadership also chose to cross its own stove-piped combat lines, such as infantry, armor, and fire support. The resultant scope of the FCS program was overly broad for a single acquisition program. Nonetheless, such a holistic view, anchored in a vision of how the land force of the future needs to fight, should continue to guide the modernization investments the Army makes. A context, it should be noted, does not necessarily equate to a program or programs. While we have reported a number of risks associated with the LSI arrangement on FCS (which are discussed later), the insights the Army gained into subcontractors was beneficial. Army leadership set up the FCS program and LSI contract in such a way that it would create more competition and have more influence over the selection of subcontractors below the LSI. Traditionally, once the Army contracted with a prime contractor, that contractor would bring its own supplier chains, and the Army was not very involved in the choice of the subcontractors. In FCS, the Army called for the LSI to hold a competition for the next tier of contractors. The Army had veto power over these selections. The Army also directed that the LSI contract with integrators at lower levels in the program, and the Army was involved with these selections. These integrators held competitions to select suppliers for those systems. This strategy kept the first tier of subcontractors from bringing their own supplier chains, and the approach promoted competition and pushed Army visibility down lower into the supplier chain. It was also a means for the Army to ensure commonality of key subsystems across FCS platforms. Enhanced visibility into the selection and design decisions of subcontractors appears to have benefited the FCS program and warrants consideration in future efforts. The Army envisioned an unprecedented information network as the backbone of FCS. Inventing such a network while concurrently designing vehicles and other systems dependent on it was too grand an approach. However, the recognition that an integrated combat network should be deliberately designed versus derived or cobbled together from other systems was discerning. Since FCS began, the Army has achieved an understanding of what the information network needs to be, what may be technically feasible, how to build it, and how to demonstrate it. It has also consciously endeavored to develop the FCS network and software over time in a series of pre-planned blocks. Although work on such a network needs to be properly situated within the acquisition process and guided by requirements that are technically realistic, the deliberate development of an integrated network seems a sound approach. The Army initiated spin-out development in 2004, when it embarked on an effort to bring selected FCS capabilities, such as the unattended ground sensors and the non-line-of-sight launch system, to current forces while core FCS development continued. In 2006, the Army established the Army Evaluation Task Force to use, evaluate, and train with the spin-out capabilities, and the Task Force began its testing of the first FCS equipment in early 2008. As noted by both Army and DOD officials, the Task Force has proven quite useful in identifying system issues and suggesting design changes. Accordingly, the Army should continue utilizing the Task Force to better understand and improve its systems, spin out and otherwise. In our work, we found the greatest obstacle to the Army’s realizing its vision for FCS to be that the program was not executable within reasonable bounds of technical, engineering, time, or financial resources. The program was very immature when it began, never measuring up to DOD’s own standards for technology and design. Over time, adjustments were made such as adding development time and trading off requirements, but nonetheless, vehicle weights and software code grew substantially, key network systems were delayed, and technologies took longer to mature than planned. By 2009, whether FCS would work as planned remained undemonstrated. As we have reported, these difficulties do not necessarily represent problems that could have been avoided; rather, they reflect the actual immaturity of the program. Yet, to a large extent, these difficulties are foreseeable at the start of programs that do not apply the standards embodied in DOD’s own acquisition policies. Oversight of FCS was extremely challenging given the program’s vast scope and the innovative, but close, partner-like relationship between the Army and the LSI. OSD did not play an active oversight role, such as stringently applying its own acquisition policies, until about the past 2 years of the program. Congress intervened by mandating a go/no-go milestone decision to occur in late 2009. Oversight was further challenged by the pace of the program; the schedule for making decisions outpaced demonstrated knowledge to the extent that major production commitments were to be made before basic designs were to be demonstrated. Lessons from this experience should be applied to put future modernization efforts on the soundest footing possible for execution. Originally, the Army intended to define thousands of requirements; mature critical technologies; and develop the network, manned and unmanned vehicles, and other systems within about 5 1/2 years from development start—much faster than a single system typically takes. When FCS entered development in 2003, the Army had not yet established firm requirements that were matched with mature technologies and preliminary designs. Although the Army lengthened the development schedule to 10 years, it did not plan to demonstrate the level of knowledge needed at development start until 2009. In 2003, only 40 percent of the FCS critical technologies were nearing maturity, although DOD’s acquisition policy called for all critical technologies to be mature at development start. Originally, the Army officials believed it could mature the remaining technologies in just 3 years. While the Army has made significant progress, today it is still conducting evaluations to demonstrate minimum maturity levels for several critical technologies. Also, the Army needed capabilities being developed by programs outside of FCS to meet network and other requirements. However, these programs were immature as well, and synchronizing them with FCS proved elusive. In particular, the Joint Tactical Radio System and Warfighter Information Network-Tactical programs, the primary enablers of the network, experienced developmental delays that adversely affected the FCS schedule. As technologies, designs, and requirements evolved, key tradeoffs became necessary. For example, the weight of the manned ground vehicles grew from 19 tons to 29 tons, and the use of the C-130 as the main transport aircraft had to be abandoned. The Army set forth an ambitious schedule for software development and the program as a whole. Originally, the Army anticipated 33 million lines of software code for FCS—which at the time made the program the largest software-intensive acquisition program in DOD history.