BAEgraphic

Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System laser-guided rocket fired from an AH-64 Apache gunship (BAE graphic)

UPDATED WASHINGTON: The Army wants to cancel $122 million in precision-guidance upgrades for helicopter-launched rockets and cut $222 million in upgrades to the venerable M2 Bradley armored troop carrier. And those are just the top two items out of 20 released today, totaling $1.13 billion in budget reductions. Those savings, in turn, helped the Army plus up its highest-priority weapons programs by almost $3 billion, as we reported Monday.

Army photo

Civilian personnel deliver the latest Bradley model, the M2A3, to Fort Riley, KS

Other big items? A $201 million reduction in the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (as we’ve previously reported) and the cancellation of the Mobile Intermediate Range Missile. The MIRM showed up as a $20 million item in the 2020 budget plan as the Mobile Medium Range Missile, when the Army projected it would cost $1 billion over 2020-2024. But the service offered almost no details about the project – I spent months trying in vain to figure out even the basics, such as whether it was a ballistic missile, cruise missile, or hypersonic – and now it dies as mysteriously as it lived.

Such ambiguity isn’t uncommon when it comes to the military, especially the infamously media-unsavvy Big Army. When Army officials rolled out their 2021 budget request Monday afternoon, they said they’d cancelled 41 acquisition programs outright and reduced spending on another 39. The service took until today before it released a list of the 20 most significant programs affected: the top 10 cancellations and top 10 reductions.

The largest single item is upgrades to the M2 Bradley, a BAE product. The Army wants to replace the Bradley completely,  although that replacement program,  OMFV, has problems of its own.

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. graphic

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. graphic

SLEP: Service Life Extension Program. Breaking Defense graphics from Army data

The Army’s infamous “Night Court” drills have found cuts in all corners of the service budget, so the 20 items are a bit of a grab-bag, but nonetheless two common themes emerged, aside from the Bradley.

Army photo

ATACMS missile launch. The Army Tactical Missile System has a range of about 188 miles, much shorter than its planned successors.

Cutbacks to artillery, missiles, & munitions totaled at least $427 million. Almost three-quarters of that came from the cancellations of the Mobile Intermediate-Range Missile ($90 million) and the Advanced Precision Kill Weapons System ($122.2 million), a laser-guidance kit for the 2.75- inch rockets fired by military helicopters. APKWS is built by BAE Systems, whose ground vehicle division has taken hits in this budget as well, but since the Navy ordered $2.9 billion of the rockets last year, BAE’s production line should have no problems staying open – which gives the Army the option to reconsider its own buy later on.

Other precision-guided weapon cutbacks include a $35.6 million reduction in upgrades for Lockheed Martin’s Army Tactical Missile System. That makes sense because the Army’s urgently developing a complete replacement for the Reagan-era ATACMS, with both Lockheed Martin and rival Raytheon already testing their competing designs for the lighter-weight and longer-ranged Precision Strike Missile (PrSM).

In a similar move, the Army completely cancelled a service-life extension for the existing Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) missiles, also by Lockheed, for a $42.5 million saving. That’s because the service and Lockheed are already developing an improved GMLRS Extended Range (ER) variant.

The service also cut $92.9 million from a landmine known as the Close Terrain Shaping Obstacle. Unspecified cuts to Army mortars ($22.7 million) and Total Army Munitions Requirements (TAMR, $21.8 million) round out this category.

The unifying theme: The Army is urgently modernizing its artillery, with an emphasis on longer-range weapons to counter Russian and Chinese missile launchers, and this year it’s clearly pruning the portfolio.

(Oshkosh photo)

JLTV with 30 mm M230 chaingun (Oshkosh photo)

Cuts to counterinsurgency-related-programs totaled another $250 million. Over 80 percent of that is from the reduction to JLTV,  a 4×4 armored truck originally intended to replace the under-armored Humvee and unganily MRAPs. As the Army refocuses on Russia and China,  it is emphasizing much more heavily armored tracked combat vehicles.

Another $45.8 million came from cuts or outright cancellation of a host of counter-IED programs to defend against roadside bombs: the Vehicle Optics Sensor System (VOSS) for the Explosive Hazard Roller and the Route Clearance Interrogation System (RCIS), both of which which detect IEDs; upgrades to the High Mobility Engineer Excavator (HMEE), an armored backhoe built by JCB; and the shutdown of a management office for CREW jammers (Counter Radio-Controlled IED Electronic Warfare).

Also in the COIN-related category is the Tactical Electric Power (TEP) family of new generators for forward bases, which the Army expects to use much less in a highly mobile future war with Russia and presumably withdraws forces from Afghanistan and the Middle East, as President Trump has pledged to do.

Other cutbacks don’t fit in these two broad categories, but they’re generally existing “legacy” programs for which some kind of successor is in the works, such as the M2 Bradley, to be replaced by OMFV; the Prophet Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) vehicle, to be replaced by the Tactical Layer System (TLS); and the DCGS-A intelligence system, which will be superseded by future Army networks.

A few of the items are more puzzling. Why would the Army cut upgrades to the Joint Assault Bridge, a vehicle-mounted extendable bridge, when it is worried about a war in Eastern Europe, which is riven by rivers? It may be the JAB is just not long enough to cross most of them. Also confusing is the cancellation of upgrades to the Heavy Equipment Transporter (HET) truck, in high demand in Europe for redeploying tanks. But with its total budget cut by $2 billion and its highest-priority programs starting to move from R&D to the more expensive production phase, the Army has to make some hard choices.

UPDATED Friday: The full lists of 20 terminations and 20 reductions follow.

Army FY21 Program Reductions by BreakingDefense on Scribd

Army FY21 Program Reductions by BreakingDefense on Scribd