Army To Sacrifice GCV To Stave Off ‘Creeping Hollowness’

[unhappycamper]

http://breakingdefense.com/2013/11/army-to-sacrifice-gcv-to-stave-off-creeping-hollowness/



The $400~$450 grand Ground Combat Vehicle

Army To Sacrifice GCV To Stave Off ‘Creeping Hollowness’
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
on November 14, 2013 at 11:36 AM

The general was the Army’s director of strategy, plans, and policy, Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Snow. “He” is the Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. James Winnefeld, Snow’s superior by two stars and about three layers of bureaucracy. And “it”? “It” is all about how big the Army needs to be.

All the services are being squeezed by the sequester, as the ongoing automatic budget cuts are known. But none is under more intense assault from both inside and outside the Pentagon than the Army. And the Army — from Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno on down– is starting to very publicly fight back.

Another reporter and I cornered Maj. Gen. Snow just after his remarks to the Defense One conference here on what he called the “creeping hollowness” that sequester is creating in the Army. I asked the general about the pressure on the Army, citing Winnefeld’s argument that the nation can no longer afford large-scale, long-duration land wars, so the Army should not be sized to do them.

~snip~

Most notably, Snow confirmed that the Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle — for which two competing contractors have already submitted detailed designs and which was supposed to enter service in 2017 — is going to be, in essence, rolled back from its current “engineering and manufacturing development” (EMD) phase and turned back into a “science and technology” (S&T) program.