I'm back with General George Casey, the Army's Chief of Staff,
and we're talking about modernization.
Sir, earlier this year, Secretary Gates stripped the vehicle portion
of the Future Combat Systems out.
You guys have been working on figuring out
what you want your next generation of ground vehicles to look like.
What does that next generation of ground vehicles need to look like?
You're exactly right.
We've been working very hard on it since April.
We've had our own team looking at it,
we've sought outside expertise to come in and help us with this,
and we've brought in brigade, battalion commanders,
sergeants major, soldiers, and consulted with them based on their recent experience
in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They told us they needed three things:
one was protected mobility,
two was adaptability,
and three was situational awareness on the move.
Let me just say a little bit about each one.
This is a fighting vehicle.
It will be an infantry fighting vehicle designed to operate from the ground up
in an IED environment.
We don't have anything like that.
It needs to have the underbelly protection of an MRAP,
it needs to have the side protection of a Bradley,
the cross country mobility of a Bradley,
and the urban mobility of a Stryker.
>>And you need it to be very adaptable
so that you can put all sorts of mission packages on it.
Absolutely. In fact, that was the second point, that they said it's got to be adaptable.
The enemy is going to adapt to us.
We have to have the capability of adapting to the enemy, so we'll design that into it.
Lastly, situational awareness on the move.
They need to network.
They need to be connected so they can understand what's happening around them
as they move about in the course of their duty.
So we are designing a vehicle that builds those three things into it.
When do you expect to be able to shape the requirement
and get a competition underway, and when do you want to have vehicles on the ramp?
When I started down this road, I said the Secretary of the Army and I
wanted to have a new vehicle on the street in five to seven years.
We are working toward that goal.
I frankly think it will be closer to seven than to five, but we're committed to that.
We have good support within the Department of Defense for that.
I think you're going to see the specifics of this in February here
as the '11 budget is announced.
We understand that the '11 budget is going to include more money
for each of the services, including $2 billion more a year for the Army
that you guys could use for modernization.
Have you figured out what you want to do with that $2 billion extra you could be getting?
[chuckles] Vago, you're going to have to wait until February
to find out the answer to that question.
The answer is yes, we know where we need to put it if there is additional money.
I'm not going to say that you're exactly right on that.
I can't speak about the budget until it's released.
What are some of your top procurement priorities, though?
Because now that FCS is looking a little bit different,
what are some of the specific things that are the most important issues
for you to resolve from a modernization standpoint?
That's a great question.
First, the ground combat vehicle is a major priority.
The second thing you're going to hear us talk about
is a brigade combat team modernization strategy,
of which the ground combat vehicle is a part.
But basically, as the Future Combat Systems Program was dissolved,
we still kept elements of the program:
the network and what we call the spin-outs.
Arguably, the most important elements of it still survived. >>Exactly.
And so what we've had to do was restructure that
and put it into capability packages that we will use to upgrade and modernize
every one of our brigades.
So that's probably the second priority. Go ahead.
What I was going to say is do you need to buy, for example, more helicopters
to satisfy lift requirements in Afghanistan?
We have enough helicopters now to meet the additional requirements in Afghanistan.
But as we talked about earlier, our aviation assets
are some of the most stretched elements of the force,
and we probably could use some additional aviation assets,
and you'll see that again as the '11 budget plays out.
Does a Humvee replacement also rank on that list of priorities for you?
Yes, but we're looking very closely at all of the utility vehicle systems we have.
I'm sure people look at us and say, "You have Humvees,
you have MRAPs, you have Strykers, you have Bradleys, you have tanks."
"What are you doing with all this?"
So we've got to go back.
We've already got a plan to incorporate the MRAPs that have been procured into our force.
>>Right. >>And so we actually have an ongoing study right now
to figure out what's the right mix of Humvees, MRAPs, Strykers.
Sir, thanks very, very much.
That's all the time we have for today.