Gates Crusade Hurts the Army

In his single-minded determination to win our current wars, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is gutting all the services’ modernization programs. Even the Army is not immune. On April 6, he cancelled the manned vehicle portion of the Future Combat System (FCS) program and truncated the Army’s effort to create more flexible modular brigades. Now the Secretary has requested Congress that he be permitted to shift roughly $1 billion in next year’s Pentagon budget from the procurement accounts to pay for a previously announced “temporary” increase in Army end strength of 22,000. To get the billion dollars for additional troops, the Secretary wants to take more than $700 million dollars from the program to modernize the Army’s medium truck fleet, particularly the workhorse Family of Medium Tactical Vehicles. This means we will have more solders and a lot fewer trucks in which to transport them. That makes no sense for an Army that is going to operate in dispersed bases across the vast spaces of places like Iraq and Afghanistan. But it is the chief hallmark of Gates’ approach to changing the military: more warriors, less equipment