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Defense budgets are almost certain to decline significantly over the next decade no matter who is in the White House. Should sequestration take place, it will be difficult for the Department of Defense (DoD) to structure a coherent defense program. But even without sequestration, DoD will have to
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Date:
6/4/2012
A senior civilian in the Army's acquisition organization says that the high cost of new tactical vehicles has less to do with inefficiency than with how long it has been since the service developed truly new systems. For instance, although the Abrams tank has been continuously upgraded and improved
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Date:
6/1/2012
One of the great tragedies of the wars of the last decade is the number of people in uniform suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. Trauma is not a condition limited to individual soldiers, although they clearly suffer the most. Institutions can experience trauma
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Date:
3/26/2012
In the opinion of many defense analysts, the Pentagon's new defense strategy severely disadvantages the U.S. Army. The strategy both rejects the idea of future protracted, large-scale stability operations and shifts the focus of security concerns to the Asia-Pacific region where air and sea forces are
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Date:
1/24/2012
The Army Systems Acquisition Review Council held a meeting about combat vehicle modernization this week, and the one message that came out of deliberations loud and clear is that the service can't afford all of the initiatives it is planning. The general consensus among members of the service's
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Date:
6/10/2011
We are about to see the results of the Army's latest effort to fix its broken acquisition system. The Army currently is evaluating three proposals for its new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). Last year, confronting the likelihood of a procurement disaster, the Army withdrew its Request for Proposal
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Date:
5/16/2011
After September 11, the Iraq invasion, Katrina and the BP oil spill the government conducted major investigations to fix responsibility and identify lessons to learn in order to avoid a repeat. It has almost become a ritual in Washington. Yet, when a major defense program collapses and is cancelled
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Date:
2/7/2011
Pretty soon the Army’s only hope of salvaging anything from its ill-fated Future Combat System (FCS) program will rest with the new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). Just last week the Army announced its decision not to equip its combat brigades with the Network Integration Kits which had been intended
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Date:
1/25/2011
The Army’s acquisition system has been captivated of late by the ongoing effort to procure a new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). In some sense the GCV along with its linear antecedent the Future Combat System has preoccupied the Army for more than a decade. The Army now wants to make the GCV contracting
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Date:
1/21/2011
Last week the U.S. Army released its revised request for proposal (RFP) for the new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). The initial proposal had been criticized as dictating too many key performance parameters which resulted, according to reports, in industry responses that were deemed technically risky
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Date:
12/8/2010
If the bleak findings of the bipartisan deficit reduction commission released today weren't enough to get defense contractors thinking about diversification, then maybe the Army's revised solicitation for a future Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) will do the trick. GCV is all that's left of the family
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Date:
12/1/2010
If you were a betting person, what chances would you give the Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program of actually producing a new system? The GCV is the Army’s attempt to salvage something from the debacle of the Future Combat System program which was sought to create a futuristic system-of-systems
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Date:
10/5/2010
Reports coming out of the Pentagon indicate that the Office of the Secretary of Defense and specifically the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics (AT&L), Dr. Ashton Carter, had a major hand in forcing the Army to withdraw its request for proposals for the new ground
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Date:
9/17/2010
Not long ago, modernization of the U.S. Army centered on the Future Combat System (FCS), a networked collection of 18 ground and aerial, manned and unmanned platforms tied together by a network. When most of that program was cancelled -- except for some near-term elements that would support the
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Date:
9/14/2010
Very shortly, the Army will announce the winners of initial contracts to build its new Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV). The GCV program was the Secretary of Defense’s consolation prize to the Army when he cancelled the manned ground vehicle portion of its Future Combat System (FCS) program. Gone are
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Date:
8/13/2010
The U.S. Army has been working very hard to reinvent itself. It has published a new Capstone concept that defines the future security environment and broadly what it demands of the Army in the way of capabilities. It has a draft operating concept that defines in more detail the missions the Army
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Date:
7/9/2010
When defense secretary Robert Gates recommended cancellation of the Army's planned family of future combat vehicles last April, he emphasized the need to develop vehicles that incorporated the operational lessons of recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Those lessons, which center on the threat
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Date:
2/19/2010