Army Releases Full List of 80 Programs it Plans to Kill or Trim Back

Soldiers from the Georgia Army National Guard's 1-118th Field Artillery Regiment of the 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team fire an M777 Howitzer during a fire mission in Southern Afghanistan on June 10, 2019. (Army photo by Sgt. Jordan Trent)

Military.com | By Matthew Cox

Published February 14, 2020

U.S. Army budget officials on Friday released the full list of 41 program eliminations and 39 program reductions service leaders made during a "night court" program review to find money for modernization projects in the fiscal 2021 budget request.

The release of the full list comes one day after the Army released two "top 10" lists, one for eliminated programs and another for the programs that would be reduced, totaling about $1.1 billion in savings.

Today, Secretary of the Army Ryan McCarthy told an audience at the National Press Club that this latest round of the night court process was not as challenging as the first round, conducted last year.

"This year was much more tepid than last year, where we moved more than $30 billion" across the five-year Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), McCarthy said. "Most of the programs were not as big as complex as last year."

READ PDF: Full List of Army Program Eliminations

READ PDF: Full List of Army Program Reductions

The full list of program eliminations features lots of smaller savings, such as $1.4 million saved on nine FIM-92 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and $303,000 from six M102 non-lethal reloadable grenades, according to the document.

Army Excalibur 155mm artillery ammunition was cut to save $71,000. Many of the program elimination line items are somewhat unclear, such as a notation about $12,000 saved from 21 M777A2s systems -- the Army's towed 155mm howitzer.

The program reductions list shows cutbacks to soldier lasers, saving $3.4 million. Two lines of reductions show 24 armor protection kits for $2.4 million each. Reducing defensive cyber tools saved $1.7 million.

The list of 41 eliminations totals $324.1 million, and the list of 39 reduction totals $868.9 million -- for a combined figure of roughly $1.2 billion for the review of legacy equipment.

Army budget officials said the night court process in total yielded $2.4 billion for fiscal 2021 alone, and another $9 billion that will be spread across the FYDP to fund modernization.

-- Matthew Cox can be reached at matthew.cox@military.com.

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Matthew Cox

Matthew Cox has been a defense reporter since 1998. During his time with Military.com he covered all the services, with a close eye on Army weapons development and procurement, body armor testing, camouflage, ammunition as well as readiness and training issues. He previously worked for 12 years for Army Times. He traveled to Afghanistan and Iraq numerous times from 2002 to 2008, covering Stryker and light infantry units in combat. He also spent four years in the U.S. Army during the second half of the 1980s, serving as an infantryman in the 82nd Airborne Division. Read Full Bio

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