In today's environment of rapidly evolving conflicts, the Army's goal is to have units that have the combat power of heavy units but that can be transported anywhere in the world in a matter of days. To address concerns about the armored vehicle fleet's aging and the difficulties involved in transporting it as well as to equip the Army more suitably to conduct operations overseas on short notice using forces based in the United States the service created the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program in 2000. A major modernization effort, the program is designed in part to develop and purchase vehicles to replace those now in the heavy forces; the new vehicles would be much lighter, thereby easing the deployment of units equipped with them. In the analysis presented in this report, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) examined the current status of the Army's fleet of armored vehicles and assessed the speed of deployment of the service's heavy forces. It also evaluated the FCS program, considering the program's costs as well as its advantages and disadvantages and comparing it with several alternative plans for modernizing the Army's heavy forces.

This report summarizes the research findings of a short-time-frame study conducted by RAND Arroyo Center to support the Army Science Board (ASB) Summer Study 2000 "Technical and Tactical Opportunities for Revolutionary Advances in Rapidly Deployable Joint Ground Forces in the 2015-2020 Era. The purpose of the RAND research was to explore a range of advanced technologies for potential contribution to the Future Combat Systems program; it is intended to be a think piece and is not a guide to the contractors charged with designing the Future Combat Systems. This research represents only one part of the ASB study, focusing specifically on force effectiveness in a notional small-scale contingency and on the associated spectrum of challenges that such a situation might entail. In conducting the study, the research team interacted with various members of the ASB, drawing extensively on their forward-looking ideas and ultimately integrating many of them into the research. High-resolution combat modeling and simulation was used to assess many key aspects of force performance, environmental factors, and system-of-systems interactions within the context of the scenario. This work should be of interest to defense policymakers, military technologists, and concept developers.

A CBO study. Assesses the competitiveness of nuclear power compared to other sources of new capacity to generate electricity.

explains how the US military transformation failed in the post-Cold war era Harvey Sapolsky is a leading defence scholar in the US will be of interest to students of strategic studies, defence studies, military studies, US politics and security studies in general