Fire support is what I have done for a living for a long while and we won't always be fighting dimwits in the desert. Unless we plan and prepare for a real full-up war, we will be caught with our knickers at half-mast.
When tanks are needed, there is no substitute. When our young people's lives depend on effective and reliable weapons, we had better have them ready and not counting beans.
“So, we design a better tank. “
I managed one of the combined teams on Future Combat Systems. It was a perfect example of how not to run a program. It was the most money ever spent of a program up to that time and the vast majority of it was wasted.
First, in order to get the Congressional votes to approve the project Boeing and SAIC had to pool their pocket-Congressmen. So, there were two program leads. If that wasn’t stupid enough, Congress tried to involve virtually every contractor and divided up the pie along ridiculous lines. Any competent vehicle manufacturer could have done the entire program alone and we would likely have had a worthwhile set of vehicles.
The Army, for their own political reasons, refused to make critical design decisions until right before the preliminary design review. Things like, will the engine be in the front, rear or middle? Will it have wheels or tracks were not made until huge amounts of money was spent and wasted. The money was spent, and wasted, because the company’s award fees were based on a spend schedule that assumed those decisions had been made in a timely fashion. Since they were not, but the money was spent anyway, it was mostly wasted. The charts, progress graphs and associated materials were mostly fiction. This was fraud on a colossal scale.
Since the program was so large, every Congressman got involved to send money to their particular agenda. The Greens got a complete ban, not only on parts with chromium or cadmium, but on any parts made by a company that also made chromium or cadmium plated parts that we were not buying. (You can’t make this stuff up.) The gays got special sensitivity training imposed on contractors and, of course, there are the usual small business set-asides and the like. All of these added hugely to the cost. Parts that tested perfect when they left had corroded by the time they arrived because they didn’t have chromium or cadmium plating.
I could go on, but I am getting tired of typing and most people probably don’t care. The point is, as long as Congress is involved, I wouldn’t trust any development program to produce a new weapon.