What Happened to FCS? An Organizational Change Case Study

Abstract

On October 12, 1999 the Chief of Staff of the Army started the Army down a path of transformation toward the objective force. The Army's goal was to equip the first objective force units with the Future Combat Systems (FCS) in 2010. In 2009, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a major restructuring of the FCS program that effectively killed the objective force vision. This paper analyzes the Army's experience with FCS using John Kotter's framework for assessing organizational change efforts. It identifies areas where the Army's transformation effort failed to successfully follow Kotter's pragmatic rules for change and discusses how this failure contributed to the failure of the program.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 14, 2011
Accession Number
ADA553074

Entities

People

  • Robert D. Bradford Iii

Organizations

  • United States Army War College

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Human Systems
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Case Studies
  • Combat Vehicles
  • Department Of Defense
  • Deployment
  • Education
  • Governments
  • Information Exchange
  • Military Acquisition
  • Military History
  • Military Operations
  • Military Science
  • National Security
  • Students
  • Systems Engineering
  • United States
  • War Colleges
  • Warfare

Readers

  • Maritime Combat Support and Expeditionary Logistics.
  • Military History of the United States in the 20th Century.