If you owned a 1978 Chevy Impala, you’ll remember that it was big and powered by a 12 mile-per-gallon (mpg) V8 engine. Its advanced safety features were lap seat belts and drum brakes. It had a push button radio and — if you were lucky — an 8-track player. It was the top selling family car in America at the time. Since then, you’ve probably owned five or six different vehicles.

Three decades later, you may be driving a crossover sport utility vehicle powered by a 35 mpg hybrid engine and rolling on 20” run-flat tires. Its advanced safety features include voice-activated controls, a crash avoidance system, stability control, an anti-lock braking system, side and rear video cameras, rollover frame, heads-up night vision display, child seats, a full suite of air bags, and automatic seat belts. The onboard computer is connected to a communications network with Global Positioning System technology, satellite radio, and OnStar — not to mention the embedded Bluetooth® software for your BlackBerry®. Basically, you have a world of information at your fingertips.

Just as the commercial market has been transformed to meet market demands, the Army is transforming to meet its Soldiers needs in an era of persistent conflict. The Army’s current vehicles and communication systems were designed in the 1970s. And, like the 1978 Chevy Impala, the vehicles are still capable, but do not adequately address today’s operational demands or requirements. Even in America, our ability to technology-enhance aging vehicles is seriously limited.

That’s why the U.S. Army has embarked upon the most ambitious and most comprehensive modernization effort since World War II. It is long overdue. Our Soldiers are depending on us to get them what they need to accomplish their mission and return home safely. We are doing everything possible to meet their needs by accelerating the delivery of vital equipment and new technologies.

Challenges to Modernizing
Modernizing an Army at war is especially challenging. To be sure, it is a technologically challenging effort, as documented in recent articles by The Washington Post (“The Complex Crux of Wireless Warfare,” on Jan. 24; “Troubled High-Tech Programs Doom Army Modernization,” on March 30; and “Weapons Upgrade Faces Big Hurdles,” on April 8). It involves complex activities, which do not escape skeptical viewpoints. Despite the skeptical views, and the challenges we face, we are modernizing successfully. We are pushing the limits of technology to provide our Soldiers with the very best weapon systems and equipment America can produce — as quickly as possible.

Much of our effort centers on providing new, more robust communications capabilities to connect our Soldiers, our leaders, and the systems that support and protect them in unprecedented ways. We are succeeding in this critical aspect of our modernization. We are already delivering some measure of our desired capabilities to our Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and providing a glimpse of what we will achieve in the future through the power of a modern, redundant network.

Our need for comprehensive modernization became apparent at the outset of current operations in Iraq. In the words of Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates at the Association of the United States Army Annual Meeting on Oct. 10, 2007, “By one count, investment in Army equipment and other essentials was underfunded by more than $50 billion before we invaded Iraq.”

This condition produced shortages in all aspects of Army equipment and combat readiness, and created extraordinary challenges for communications. GEN William “Scott” Wallace, the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command Commanding General, who led the U.S. Army V Corps into Baghdad in 2003, summarized the situation well. “When we attacked into Iraq in 2003, we were burdened with a legacy communications system designed for a fight in Central Europe. There was a digital divide that existed between operational and tactical headquarters.”

Wallace’s current assessment reflects the progress we are making. “Bandwidth and the resultant connectivity are [now] being pushed to the lowest tactical level — exactly where it needs to be in the decentralized operations taking place today. We have an obligation to continue this development — to get Soldiers and small unit leaders the information [that] they want, and the knowledge that they demand and deserve.”

Our 19-year-old teenagers use their cell phones to communicate in real time anywhere and anytime. They talk to friends, access the Internet, send e-mail, and transmit photos and videos. The Army believes that our 19-year-old Soldiers at war must have the same ability to communicate in real time, especially since it may mean the difference between victory and defeat on the battlefield. That is why we are working hard — through our Army modernization strategy — to make it possible.

Government Accountability Office (GAO) Reports
Recent reporting by The Washington Post relies heavily on concerns stated in several GAO reports that depict a fundamentally troubled Army modernization strategy. We welcome the helpful insights of GAO, which actually works side-by-side with us in several of our developmental activities. We recognize, as well, that GAO’s job is to cast a critical eye on military procurements and government programs.

Some of GAO’s concerns are legitimate, and we are learning from them. Many, however, are not. For example, the GAO asserts that our Future Combat Systems (FCS) software code requirements have tripled in size since 2003. In reality, real growth in software code has been very modest — about five percent. Additionally, much of the “new code” counted by GAO is commercial code already in use in the private sector. We are integrating and testing previously developed government and commercial code with new code. Employing existing commercial code does not pose technological development challenges. While other challenges do exist, we believe the accompanying risks to be manageable — and we are partnered with the Nation’s leading academic and industry experts on software development to address them.

We have several differences with the methodology applied by GAO, which we have communicated to them. Space constraints preclude me from describing all of them in this article. A key idea that should be noted is that many of our most successful Army weapon systems and equipment were initially met with skepticism by GAO. For example, in 1979, GAO reported that the M1 Abrams tank, then in development, “Falls short of meeting some of its critical design requirements. The principal problems are in the tank’s reliability and durability.”

Thirteen years later, after Operation Desert Storm, GAO acknowledged that “Abrams reliability throughout the ground campaign was very good, provided the necessary spare and repair parts were available. Some crews, [in fact], reported that the Abrams tanks were the ‘best combat vehicles on the battlefield’.”

Future Success Stories
The Army foresees similar success stories with the vehicles and communications networks being built today through its FCS, Warfighter Information Network-Tactical, and Joint Tactical Radio System modernization programs. To deal with the exponential pace of computer and software advances in recent years, the Army has adopted a phased approach to development for each of these programs — an approach that is commonplace in the commercial world. We develop and deliver software in stages, or increments. In this manner, we identify and resolve problems, and integrate the latest technologies into the force without disrupting our entire modernization effort. This approach is both technically and fiscally feasible.

Our modernization strategy is flexible, adaptive, and well suited to the uncertainties inherent to the environment in which we operate. Many of the alleged problems cited by The Washington Post are directly attributable to this approach. We do not adopt rigid, 5- or 10-year plans to which we dogmatically adhere without regard to our current operational experience and the lessons we are learning. Instead, we continuously refine and adapt our efforts to address new requirements in an effort to keep ahead of the ruthless-thinking, adaptive enemies we face.

The hard lessons of the last 6 years of combat are driving changes across our Army and our Armed Forces. These lessons are reflected in our new doctrine, which is a revolutionary departure from past doctrine. It describes an operational concept that requires commanders to employ offensive, defensive, and stability or civil support operations simultaneously — as part of an interdependent joint force — to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative, accepting prudent risk as may be needed to create opportunities to achieve decisive results. This doctrine is the engine driving change in our concepts and designs for organizations, training, leader development, and the materiel solutions we need to support our modernization strategy.

Development risk exists in any venture that seeks to move beyond the status quo; and it must be actively managed and mitigated to the maximum extent possible. Without assuming some risk, however, progress will never occur.

The real risk to our Soldiers, our Army, and the cause we serve lies not with a modernization effort that is both comprehensive and ambitious. Rather, the real risk lies with a failure to realize that the world has changed and that our Army must change accordingly.