Some of the most expensive lawn ornaments you’ll ever see were spread out on the grass in front of the Capital building in Washington, DC yesterday, when the Army’s Future Combat Systems program trotted out some of its Spinout One technologies for the press. Favorites such as the Non Line of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C) (See DTI’s June issue); Class 1 and Class IV Unmanned Air Vehicles; unmanned MULE transport and Armed Robotic Vehicle-Assault; Unattended Ground Sensors (See DTI’s June issue); and finally, the Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle were on display for the sweating throngs of journos congregated under the wilting sun.

NLOS Cannon. Photos by Paul McLeary

This being Washington, most attendees were decked out in jackets and ties, or heels and conservatively long skirts, save for the FCS folks, who ported snazzy FCS-emblazoned polo shirts and baseball caps. There was even a politician on hand to complete the capital city set-piece. Sen. James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma) took to the microphone to laud the FCS program and complain about unnamed “members of the House and the Senate who don’t care about modernizing,” the military’s hardware.

The senator went on to talk about the strides the Russians and Chinese are making in modernizing their military equipment, and said that with the NLOS cannon, the United States Army now has the best NLOS cannon in the world, and “we need to get this cranked up, in the field, and start winning battles for us.”

It’s worth pointing out that while the senator was concerned about equipping American service members with the best equipment for the battlefield, and he mentioned keeping ahead of the Chinese and Russians, he never once mentioned the foe the country currently faces: small groups of loosely-affiliated insurgents who use small arms and IEDs to fight, and not big-ticket weapons systems.

Bringing the event back to the current threat, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey stepped up to the microphone to say that he agreed with Secretary of Defense Gates that “we need weapons systems that we can field while we’re at war—it has to be relevant to the war that we’re fighting today.” The general also said that “no decisions” have been made about accelerating more FCS technologies. When asked about how the Army plans to integrate the FCS brigades into the overall force, Casey surprisingly pleaded ignorance, saying that “we don’t know all the ins and outs of how this is gonna work.”

Armed MULE 

Jumping off from his comments about fielding weapons and vehicles that are relevant to the wars the military is fighting today, I asked the general about plans to convert the common chassis found on FCS’s family of Manned Ground Vehicles (MGV) from the current flat hulls to more IED-resistant V-shaped hulls like those found on MRAPs. Gen. Casey replied that V-shaped hulls are in development, but once attached, they raise the overall profile of the vehicle. “The thing about this is height. If you make it too high you can’t get it on the C-17.” He added that he believes that IEDs “are going to be part of most any environment” the American military faces for the foreseeable future.

Once the general finished speaking, Maj. Gen. Charles Cartwright, program manager for FCS (BCT) told me that early versions of the V-shaped hull kits went into development several months ago and that they’re looking at the 2011 time frame to complete testing. In order to attach a V-shaped hull, he explained, you would have to lift the entire vehicle platform up and bolt the kit underneath the chassis, in the process making the vehicle ride higher than originally intended. In order to keep the bottom of the vehicle high enough above the ground to deflect an IED blast, the entire vehicle would end up being raised “8 to 15 inches” from its original configuration. And as general Casey said, that makes it problematic for air transport.

Later in the afternoon, Maj. Chester Keeton told me that the V-hull kits will add “a couple tons” to the overall weight of the vehicle, and would probably be transported separately to theater so that the armor can be added on there, instead of shipping the whole thing together. Maj. Keeton also said that the seats in the MGV’s will be up armored, and will be similar to the seats currently found in the Buffalo MRAP.

While we’re still some years away from the MGV’s being fielded, it’s important to note that given all the talk about equipping soldiers with what they need on the battlefield today, the fact that the V-shaped hull is only being added as an optional add-on is curious. Coupled with Inhofe’s comments about large, state-centric threats, it makes you wonder about the attitude in some high places about the contemporary battlefield. The United States is currently fighting two insurgencies, and there is reason to believe that it will continue to fight small groups of non-state actors--armed with IEDs--for quite some time before it is confronted with a peer opponent. In other words, IEDs are the threat. So while FCS managers are working toward meeting this threat, that it took the Army this long to figure out that it needed to do something about the flat hulls on its emerging MGV fleet raises questions.