a) Chiarelli not only passed through the "Rumsfeld sieve", he was a golden boy. In my eyes, that makes both his motivations and his ability to adapt to a reality that does not mesh with his ideological belief system and goals suspect.
b) The opportunity for failure increases exponentially with the complexity and number of components involved with a system - and the ways to defeat that system increase exponentially with the number of points that it is required to interface with external systems.
FCS needs to be actively developed on a small scale with the goal of absolute perfection when and if deployed - coincident with active development of systems to defeat it in order to ascertain whether it will ever be deployable.
c) Tanks and APVs are and will remain useful until such time as they can be cost-effectively replaced with hovercraft with many more capabilities than we have now. Capabilities like being able to move and hover a dozen feet or more above broken terrain - so don't hold your breath.
Secretary Rumsfeld killed off the Crusader program in 2002 because he thought it was too expensive, too heavy, too conventional, too Cold War. He wanted the Army to rely on airplanes 200 miles away for fire support, and it was a stupid decision. (I was a targeteer during Desert Shield/Desert Storm when we tried that idea the first time, with the kill box concept.) Ground combat requires artillery and events in Afghanistan and Iraq have borne that out. Now, the M109 series is six years older and the Future Combat System is being threatened with cancellation, so my question is, why must the Army - the service that has carried the heaviest burden in the GWOT - sacrifice yet another major weapons system?
The whole point of Net-Centric Operations and Warfare is to have plug and play systems built on maturing net-centric standards. Of course, in combat, commanders always, or should always, have alternate plans when high-tech, interoperable systems are either compromised, or destroyed. While you can put in place advanced Command and Control net-centric systems that allows a commander to increase his tempo against the enemy, the commander is also trained to operate without those systems. Any other policy is just plain negligence.
The article mentioned some critics say land vehicles like that are relics of the cold war. How retarded. Just because we're fighting insurgents today doesn't mean that 5 or 10 years from now we won't be fighting a conventional war. We lost Vietnam because the powers that be were all geared up for a conventional war, but it didn't happen. We went into Vietnam with F-4 fighters that didn't even have guns because they said dog fighting was a relic of WW2. Idiots.
