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Transformation on track

Mar-24-2004 » Filed Under: General Military , Iraq News

[Link to Full Article]
By Spc. Lorie Jewell

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, March 24, 2004) – Senior Army leaders gave emphatic assurances that efforts to transform the Army and properly equip the current force fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan are at top speed during their recent testimony to the Senate Armed Services’ Subcommittee on Airland. [...]

Resource shortfalls are not putting the Army behind in moving forward with future force plans, Bolton stressed, describing the Future Combat System as the most complex undertaking the Defense Department has ever done. In breadth of scope, he compared it to the Manhattan Project in the 1940s and the space program of the 1960s.

The Future Combat System will include unmanned vehicles on the ground and in the air; mobile robots with arms that can fire mortars; a non-line-of-sight cannon; lighter vehicles that can fit into a C-130 cargo plane; and blue force tracking, the ability to network sensors from all of those items to give Soldiers the ability to know where the enemy is and what it’s doing.

Some of that is already being used to some degree, the leaders said. The Stryker infantry carriers, on the ground now in Iraq, can be transported in the C-130. One of the first things done in Afghanistan to reduce risk to Soldiers, Bolton said, was to put robots in caves with Web cams to show whether there were weapons inside. Another advancement was finding a way to open locks without breaking them while searching Afghan homes for weapons, reducing burdens on citizens who could not afford to replace locks in the event no weapons were found.


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