The Army Must Balance Expensive Modernization with Lower Cost Upgrades
The consequence of this strategy is soaring maintenance costs for aging platforms that can produce a death spiral in which a military service lacks the resources either to maintain an obsolescent system or to acquire a new one.
Dan Goure [2]
Modernizing military forces is never cheap. Even if buying new equipment will result in lower life-cycle costs, the upfront investment is inevitably substantial. When defense budgets are tight, the tendency is to defer modernization, particularly for non-combat platforms.
Source URL (retrieved on June 22, 2018):
http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-army-must-balance-expensive-modernization-lower-cost-26310?page=show