Shyu Sings The Army Electric: 2015 Budget Sacrifices Weapons For Electronics

http://breakingdefense.com/2014/03/shyu-sings-the-army-electric-services-2015-budget-sacrifices-weapons-for-electronics/



Shyu Sings The Army Electric: 2015 Budget Sacrifices Weapons For Electronics
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on March 03, 2014 at 5:10 PM

WASHINGTON: The 2015 budget effectively kills the Army’s top priority weapons program, the 60-plus-ton Ground Combat Vehicle — as we’ve been predicting since November — but GCV did not die in vain, the Army’s acquisition chief insists.

“We sacrificed the GCV” to save programs upgrading electronics on existing vehicles, assistant secretary Heidi Shyu said last week at a Bloomberg conference. That doesn’t mean Army information technology will escape unscathed when the budget is released tomorrow, or that the service will stop investing in new vehicles.

On the “cut” side of the equation, Shyu has emphasized in a string of recent appearances that the service will take a hit to each of its three largest investment portfolios: aviation, mission command electronics, and ground combat systems, in that order. (The fourth largest, science and technology, is being protected as what Shyu calls “seed corn” for the post-sequestration future).

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The difference is that aviation and ground combat are sacrificing high-profile vehicles — the stillborn Armed Aerial Scout helicopter and the GCV respectively — but mission command will simply buy smaller quantities of networking gear, radios, and so on, rather than kill off an entire major program.