We know the Future Combat System is overbudget. But does the U.S. even need it?

I’m all for new toys. The Future Combat System is an Army project that hopes to create a new fleet of military vehicles that can network with soldiers, robots and remotely-controlled drones. The Pentagon estimates the project will cost $159 billion. But in its latest confirmation of news we already knew, The Washington Post says the program’s critics are skeptical, raising the real cost to exceed DoD’s projections.

The problem with FCS isn’t its cost — because how do you put a price on saving soldiers’ lives? The same argument led Congress to approve some of the largest defense budgets in history. No, the real reason critics should oppose FCS is because it was a poorly executed idea. It’s a relic of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld‘s notion of network-centric warfare. Rumsfeld’s vision of a lighter, mobile military that can move faster, shoot farther and hide better is an extension of the idea that “if we can see it, we can hit it — and if we can hit it, we can destroy it.”

For the military, being able to destroy anything more efficiently has become a goal in itself. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. What use is a fighting force if it can’t disarm opponents quickly? But killing the enemy has now become less productive than it once was. Today, building infrastructure and providing basic services like sanitation have become critical to winning small wars — arguably more so than simply shooting at things.

It’s still important to prepare for conventional war. FCS would prove most useful in an all-out fight with a state with lots of tanks, planes and men. But as John Nagl has said, the U.S. has given up only a fraction of its conventional warfighting capability in exchange for immeasurable amounts of experience infighting unconventional wars.

So while FCS would be useful, it’s not clear that it makes any significant contributions to the U.S.’s already rock-solid global military posture. It’s a project that’s effective conceptually, and would certainly provide soldiers a huge tactical advantage on the ground.  Still, I can’t help but think it was designed for the wrong war — or at least, the kind of war that the U.S. should be less interested in waging these days.