The magnificent FCS looks awfully Leviathan-like

■"Army Display Woos Project's Foes," by Jonathan Karp, Wall Street Journal, 22 September 2005, p. A6.

Army trots out some Future Combat System gear and does some demos for congressional leaders and staff who seem intent on stripping the program of some of its $125 billion price tag, believing it's chock-full of immature technologies that-even if they did work-wouldn't exactly be useful in the sort of counter-insurgency Fourth Generation Warfare that Army's likely to be focused on in coming years and decades.

Rumsfeld's been promising the Army that if they switched from a century of big division structure (stretching back to the First World War) to these new, smaller brigade units of action, that the FCS would be its reward. Historically, I think this will go down as a bait and switch: the reformatting of the divisions will occur, but FCS will prove to be a fairly small carrot in the end. Too complex, too expensive, and not relevant enough to the likely battlefields of tomorrow.