Army Study Asks: How Much Modernization Can We Afford?

The Army's drive to modernize by 2035 is too big for traditional five-year spending plans, acquisition chief Bruce Jette said. So he's reviving long-term economic forecasting used in the Cold War.

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR.on June 09, 2020 at 12:37 PM

WASHINGTON: The Army's acquisition chief says the service is sticking with its 34 top-priority programs – in the face of budget pressure from the pandemic. But most of those programs will only move from prototypes to mass production in the second half of the 2020s; then they stay in service for decades with repeated upgrades. So, assistant secretary Bruce Jette says, the Army needs to exploit new technologies like 3D printing and modular upgrades to reduce long-term costs – but also revive long-term economic forecasting techniques largely neglected since the Cold War.

“At this point, we're remaining on schedule with the ‘31 plus 3,'” Jette said during an Association of the US Army webcast yesterday. (The Army divides the 34 programs this way because 31 of them, from intermediate-range missiles to smart rifles, are managed by Army Futures Command, but three of the most technologically challenging – hypersonic missiles and two types of missile defense lasers – belong to the independent Rapid Capabilities & Critical Technologies Office).

But the service needs to do more planning: “A second thing in the background that we are doing is taking a look at a holistic model, an economic model of the Army.”

“We are taking some steps to provide additional data in case there's a prioritization that does come down the road, due to changes in the budget profiles,” Jette said. “That business requires us to have this long-term full understanding of economics, which is what we're focused on trying to develop over the next year.”

That study will help inform Army leaders if they have to make a hard choice on which of the 34 priority programs to put first – and, while Jette didn't say so aloud, which may be cut back or canceled entirely.

Beyond 2026

The Pentagon normally builds its annual budget two years ahead of time. Congress is now considering the 2021 request, largely drafted in 2019. Those budgets include a less-detailed annex, called the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP) that outlines the five years ahead.

Now, some of the Army's new weapons will enter service in that timeframe, in limited numbers, including new hypersonic and intermediate-range missiles in 2023. But many, including some of the most expensive, will take longer. So new armored vehicles won't enter service until 2028, new high-speed aircraft not until 2030. Actually building enough to equip a sizable combat force takes even longer. The Army aims to build a decisive counter to Russian aggression by 2028, but expect a force adequate to counter China only by 2035.

“I have to have a much longer view of the battlespace, the economic battle space,” Jette said. “The objective [is] to lay a foundation upon which we can take a serious look at what the long-term implications of owning a piece of equipment,” he said.

So “I'm working with the G-8 [the Army's deputy chief of staff for resourcing]. In fact, we just had a meeting on this last week to pull out some models that were actually used more in the Cold War, that we sort of let wane [during] Iraq and Afghanistan.... Next week I go up to West Point to have ORSA [Operations Research/Systems Analysis] cell up there that specifically is focused on economics.”

New Tricks

Now, the Army doesn't plan to simply repeat its Cold War past. The Reagan-era “Big Five” – the M1 Abrams and M2 Bradley armored vehicles, Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, and Patriot missile defense system – have been repeatedly upgraded since their inception. But these platforms are running out of room for more horsepower, armor protection, and firepower, and they were never designed to allow the constant upgrades required to keep pace with modern advances in electronics.

The M1 Abrams, for instance, is literally hard-wired. “There are literally, in a tank, over a couple of tons of cabling, all tremendously expensive and all very, very structured,” said Jette, a former tanker himself. “So if you want to change something ... you have to re-cable large portions of it.”

The Army must account not only for the up-front cost to research, develop, and build the new weapons, Jette emphasized, but also the much larger long-term bill to operate, maintain and upgrade them. “If we don't think about how it's going to be enhance-able, upgradable, and modified for different uses over a period of time,” he said, “we're missing things, because we do keep them for 30, 40 years.

“For industry, if you have a good idea and a new component, how do we get them in a vehicle without having to replace half of the components?” he asked. That requires a new approach called modular open systems architecture that allows you to plug-and-play any new component as long as it meets certain technical standards. “By getting this much more open architecture in place on these vehicles,” he said, “we think that we're going to be able to keep them growing to the future over that 30 to 40 year period.”

The Army is also eager to use digital designs, 3D printing, and other advanced manufacturing techniques so it can print out spare parts as needed, rather than stockpile vast quantities of everything it might need for every system. (Jette just visited the Army's 3-D printing hub at Rock Island Arsenal, he said enthusiastically). But this vision raises complex issues of not only managing the technical data but wrangling out the legal rights to use it. Many companies depend on the long-term revenue from selling spares and upgrades, and they're not

It's a knotty intellectual property issue that Jette is keenly aware of, being a patent-holder and former small businessman himself.

“I do understand ... what type of risk it is. I'll frankly admit that many of the people in the military who fundamentally only been in the military don't understand,” Jette said. “If the risk is totally on you, and it makes no economic sense, I recommend you not answering the RFP.”

If too few companies respond to an official Request For Proposals, Jette said, that provides valuable feedback to the Army that maybe it's doing something wrong – feedback he can use in his own quest to educate the service. “Sometimes,” he said, “challenges to RFPs are a good way for you to help me to make sure that people understand that this is too much risk we're asking of industry.”

https://breakingdefense.com/2020/06/army-study-asks-how-much-modernization-can-we-afford