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Defense shake-ups from the Obama Administration have long been anticipated, but only now are the likely details of the revisions to force structure beginning to emerge.  At the moment, it appears the Army will face some of the largest changes as the Pentagon prepares to face current and future threats.

One of the programs likely to be cut or severely scaled back will be to the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS).  Secretary Gates has already made it quite clear in the past that he is not convinced of the program’s utility or of it’s exorbident cost.  The real issue here is that FCS is largely designed to enhance the Army’s dominance in a convention war against a conventional enemy, whereas virtually all likely near-future opponents will engage is insurgency style conflicts.  Additionally, while many aspects of FCS are supposed to be completed soon, with the first FCS equipped units fielded in 2015, the entire program has been fraught with so many delays and budget-overruns that it is likely DoD planners are considering very large cuts.

The other major debate is over manpower.  The Army is currently at its authorized strength of 547,000, but many have advocated growing the force to 600,000 or even 800,000.  The ArmyTimes article I linked at the start of this post has a good summary of the issues at hand, and I’d advise giving it a read-through.  Exactly what changes take place and what direction DoD ultimately takes remains to be seen, but it’s likely we’ll see a good deal of news on this in the next couple weeks.

Some pretty big news coming through the wires today, plus some miscellaneous stuff that was missed earlier in the week:

1) Unless you have been trapped under a rock today (and my sincere apologies if you have been), you’ll have heard that President Obama is planning to withdraw combat troops from Iraq within 16-months, leaving only a residual force of 50,000 to train Iraqi troops and, presumably, prevent anything from getting out of hand.  All remaining troops will, supposedly, be out by the end of 2011, in accordance with our status of forces agreement signed by the Bush Administration (though if anything does get out of hand, it is almost a guarantee that that period would be extended).  Nothing here is a massive surprise here, though some observers, myself included, are somewhat surprised that the president is sticking with his original draw-down plan.  This having been said, the president has already assured Republican legislators that “the plan to withdraw all combat forces will be revisited if conditions on the ground in Iraq deteriorate.”

Somewhat amusingly, Congressional Democrats are already moving to voice their displeasure with the residual force that will be left in place after the initial 16-month draw-down, with Nancy Pelosi going so far as to declare that “[she] does know what the justification is for 50,000, a presence of 50,000 troops in Iraq,” could be.  Since we can safely assume that Rep. Pelosi is neither an idiot nor wilfully ignorant, and given the fact that the statement was made to the decidedly leftist Rachel Maddow, it seems reasonable to conclude that these comments are mostly geared toward the more extremist anti-war left.  Nonetheless, it illustrates the resistance that the administration will face from within its own party in attempting to manage the conclusion of the war.

2) The robotic exoskeleton is truly an idea that is too cool to die, and the newest iteration, brought to us by our fine friends at Lockheed Martin, might actually work.  Long story short, ever since having read Starship Troopers one too many times, a large number of military leaders and innovators have been inspired by the possibility of future infantry being equipped with robotic exoskeletons or powered armor to enhance strength, survivability, and loadout.  Sarkos, a subsidiary of Raytheon, made some progress on a similar design last year, though the new Lockheed model appears to be more field expedient (pack-up and break-down is easy) and provides somewhat more mobility, at the expense of the upper-body strength enhancement that Sarkos suit included.  In any case, it’ll be a while before we see any of these babies on the battlefield, but it’s interesting to report that progress is indeed being made.

3) TWO-WORDS: Armed Segways.  No, seriously.  Future Combat Systems (FCS) envisions a huge variety of technological improvements to US equipment and changes to all aspects of our warfighting capabilities, from new armors to new sensors to new combat vehicles.  Tucked away somewhere within this vision is apparently a vision for armed Segways (refer to Scenario #1 of the prior link).  Segways will apparently provide future warfighters with the ability to “patrol the dusty streets of the small Afghan villages farther and with less strain than patrolling on foot,” for the slight tradeoff of looking completely ridiculous.  Regardless of whether the dream of armed Segway patrols comes true, the article provides a good general sense of the capabilities that FCS seeks to implement and serves as a good primer for FCS’ goals and programs as a whole.

That’s it for now!  Have a great weekend.