At the beginning of the 70s, at the end of the Vietnam War, the US Army began a vast program to modernize its forces, which took the name "Big 5", because it focused on 5 emblematic pieces of equipment of American military power for the next 40 years: the M1 Abrams battle tank, the M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle, the AH-64 Apache combat helicopter, the UH-60 Black Hawk maneuver helicopter and the anti-aircraft defense system -air and anti-Patriot missiles. Like the US Air Force's F15 and F16 combat planes, Nimitz aircraft carriers, Ticonderoga cruisers, Los Angeles nuclear submarines and US Navy F18s, this equipment allowed the Pentagon to take a major technological ascendancy over the Soviet Union, and made the United States the great nominal winner of the Cold War.
The US Army, which for 15 years focused almost exclusively on counter-insurgency missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, noticed from 2016 that it risked losing technological ascendancy vis-à-vis countries like China or Russia, which maintained a more or less visible effort to modernize their armed forces in the event of so-called “high intensity” engagements. This is how, under the leadership of General Mattis, then Secretary of Defense in the new Trump administration, the US Army began thinking about modernizing its capabilities and resources. And as the “Big 5” super program had produced results far exceeding expectations, she quickly came to define a new super program, this time identified as the “Big 6”.
While the Big 5 covered 5 major pieces of equipment, the Big 6 is made up of 6 main families of modernization needs: armored vehicles and terrestrial drones, helicopters, long range artillery, The Anti-aircraft and anti-missile defense, data networks, and infantry upgrades. And these 6 large families are also broken down into 31 equipment and resources programs. And all of this is going to be expensive, very expensive. Thus, the budget required to respect the defined schedules requires $57 billion over the 2020-2024 period alone. Knowing the propensity of American programs not to respect the budgetary envelopes initially defined, many specialists warn against the sustainability of this super program.
This is particularly the case Heidi Shyu, who was in charge of acquisitions for the US Army from 2011 to 2015, when the budget allocated to military programs varied from one year to the next depending on political decisions. According to her, the “Big 6” super-program would be too ambitious, and would expose the US Army to very significant risks. Indeed, one of its major characteristics is based on the simultaneous development of a large number of highly technological programs, which should enable a generational shift in the US Army over a relatively short period. However, as said previously, defense programs, especially in the United States, often exceed their initial planning and their budget. If several major programs were to slip simultaneously, the US Army would be forced to make decisions involving possible disruptions in capabilities at a critical moment and particularly exposed to China or Russia.
Even if the programs were to proceed according to plan, exogenous factors could have negative consequences amplified by this excessive ambition and simultaneity. Thus, if an economic or financial crisis, like the one predicted by many economists for the years to come, were to hit the United States, the US Army would probably be exposed to budget reductions, again leading to critical disruptions in capabilities. Even without entering into an extreme scenario, the current structure of the super program, and the lack of room for maneuver that it generates, acts as a risk multiplier if certain programs were to overflow, while the economic situation was simply tender, preventing any budget increase.
These risks led Heidi Shyu to call on the US Army to be more reasonable, by already arbitrating which programs, permitted by the 31 equipment programs, should be postponed or eliminated, so as to give the “Big 6” a reasonable chance of being completed even if events not taken into account were to appear.
In addition, the spread of highly technological programs would, in an induced way, reduce the technological risk itself. Indeed, by developing the majority of an army's critical systems on the same existing and technological postulates, we expose all forces to increased overall vulnerability, as well as to the simultaneous obsolescence of all systems. In this area, we must recognize that the approach adopted by Russia, which combines successive technological developments in tiled mode and which organizes the technological transition of its forces through modernization programs for its equipment in service, while concentrating high-tech developments on critical systems, such as hypersonic weapons, presents much greater resilience as well as effective smoothing of military power over time, despite severe economic setbacks encountered since 2014.