The Army's $200 Billion Makeover

He called it the "Aha moment."

Then a fiasco hastened the Army's commitment to modernize. In 1999, the Army was bogged down in muddy logistics as it sought to move Apache helicopters into Albania so they could be used in the Kosovo war. They didn't make it before the fight ended, an embarrassment that prompted Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki to declare that the service needed to get lighter and faster -- quickly.

A Sprawling Program

Today, the Army program involves more than 550 contractors and subcontractors in 41 states and 220 congressional districts, a wide dispersal of Defense Department funds that generates political goodwill, military observers said. "When a program gets to a certain size, in the billions, it employs so many people in so many districts you can't kill it," said a congressional staffer and former Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the ongoing review of the program. "It's kind of like the Titanic. How do you move it five degrees?"

The big program is being tested in the biggest of places -- Fort Bliss, which is larger than Rhode Island. But in some ways, the base feels like fictional Mayberry, sprinkled with little houses, neat lawns and holiday lights. Here, the Army assembled about 1,000 soldiers, called the Army Evaluation Task Force, or AETF, this summer to test Future Combat Systems, the first time it dedicated a brigade solely to evaluate new weapons and devices, service officials say. About two-thirds were chosen because of their combat experience in Iraq and Afghanistan. The brigade commander was handpicked as well. It isn't just that Schaill looks the part -- a broad-shouldered military man with speckles of gray in his crew cut. He served as deputy commander of a brigade in Iraq using Strykers, giving him experience with lighter, faster combat vehicles.

Schaill also experienced getting shot in Iraq. In January 2005, while he was visiting local police in a castle in the northern city of Tall Afar, a car bomb detonated nearby. When he stepped out to find out what happened, he found himself in a firefight with insurgents. Just as he cocked his right arm to fire his M4 carbine, a bullet ripped through his right wrist and biceps. He came home with about 30 stitches and a bullet fragment in his arm. He also returned with an abiding sense that things would've turned out better had he had the benefit of surveillance from an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV. "I would've much preferred to fly a UAV up there," he said.

Soldiers call it the "beer keg" or the "scrubbing bubble" from the old television commercial for the bathroom cleaning product. The UAV, a remote-controlled hovering craft built by Honeywell that weighs 29 pounds, is one of the more gee-whiz devices to emerge from Future Combat Systems.

The drone, essentially a cylinder on legs, uses a rotary fan to fly like a helicopter and comes with infrared night vision. The military has been using about 50 of an early version of the UAV for less than a year to identify improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, in Iraq, officials said. . The device isn't equipped with a protective shield, so someone could simply knock it down with a rock or bullet. But Rickey E. Smith, a retired colonel who now heads the Washington office of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, or ARCIC, which oversees the experimental brigade, said, "Would you rather have the bad guy shoot at that or at a soldier?"

A similar idea -- to protect the soldier -- is helping to drive the development of a robot called a Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or SUGV, 1,200 of an early version which is being used in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials said. Built by iRobot, it weighs less than 30 pounds, runs on rubber tracks and features a long, flexible neck with a camera and sensors perched on top. Soldiers, reared on video games, persuaded developers to let them use controllers similar to Microsoft's Xbox to remotely navigate the robots in caves, tunnels and sewers, where they have defused thousands of IEDs. Soldiers have become so enamored of the robot that they've nicknamed it "Johnny," given its resemblance to the robot in the "Short Circuit" movies.

The Army isn't as far along with the software that will connect the drones, robots and weapons in a network. The software development is an "unprecedented undertaking," the largest in Defense Department history, according to a March report by the GAO, Congress's investigative arm. In 2003, when the project began, the Army estimated it would need 33.7 million lines of code; it's now 63.8 million.

But John Morrocco, a spokesman for Boeing, which is developing key parts of the software, said a third of the code has been delivered.

Another problem is that the Army is giving itself only a dozen years from the time of the program's official launch to field a brigade with eight manned combat vehicles linked with six unmanned vehicles, drones, robots and sensors involving about 50 critical technologies, said Paul L. Francis, the GAO's director of acquisition and sourcing management. "We've never done a tank in five years," he said. That alone could take 10 to 15 years, involving about five critical technologies, he said.

According to Defense Department best practices, the Army should not have launched Future Combat Systems until critical technologies were more mature, the GAO said. "We're not saying they're not making progress," Francis said. But he added, "They're getting to the point they should've been in 2003."