Building the Future Force: Challenges to Getting Military Transformation Right

The United States military is in the midst of a major transformation effort, largely conceived around weapons systems procurement. This process of transformation through acquisition will not produce fully operational capabilities for another 15–20 years. But will the capability sets that these weapons represent enable, or will they constrain, the policy options of future national decision-makers? Although national security policy should drive the development of future military capabilities, that is seldom the case, as these problems show. The problem arises largely from three challenges to transformation: the difference in planning horizons between national security and weapons systems or policy lag; problems with the role of the armed forces in weapons systems decision-making; and the Department of Defense's fixation on the narrow theoretical constructs of Network Centric Warfare. These problems are illustrated here by the US Army's dominant contemporary procurement project, the Future Combat System. Overcoming these challenges will require bureaucratic reform throughout the government's national security community, including the National Security Council, Department of Defense and the Congressional Armed Services committees.