SecDef Gates: Why I Tore Up the Army's "Future"

Of all the hard choices Defense Secretary Robert Gates had to make in his radical overhaul of the Pentagon’s arsenal, the toughest, he tells Danger Room, was the decision to gut Future Combat Systems, the Army’s $200 billion effort to design a fleet of next-generation tanks and troop carriers.

For nearly a decade, the Army has worked on a set of lightly armored, deeply networked combat vehicles to speed U.S. soldiers into battle. It’s the service’s signature effort to upgrade its forces for the wars of tomorrow. But ultimately, Gates says, the Army made the wrong call about how it could wage war in the future. So he eliminated all the vehicles in the Future Combat Systems, or FCS, project.