In the Army's vision, the war of the future is increasingly combat by mouse clicks.

A $200 billion project called Future Combat Systems involves creating a family of 14 weapons, drones, robots, sensors and hybrid-electric combat vehicles connected by a wireless network. It has turned into the most ambitious modernization of the Army since World War II and the most expensive Army weapons program ever, military officials say.

It's also one of the most controversial. Even as some early versions of these weapons make their way onto the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, members of Congress, government investigators and military observers question whether the Defense Department has set the stage for one of its biggest and costliest failures.

At risk, they say, are billions of taxpayer dollars spent on exotic technology that may never come to fruition, leaving the Army little time and few resources to prepare for new threats.

Future Combat Systems "has some serious problems," said Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawai'i, chairman of the House air and land forces subcommittee. "Since its inception, costs have gone up dramatically while promised capability has steadily diminished. ... And now, with the Army's badly degraded state of readiness from nearly five years of continuous combat in Iraq, I don't see how the Army can afford to rebuild itself and pay for the FCS program as it stands today."

To hear the military tell it, there's a hint of Buck Rogers in the program, including an unmanned craft that can hover like a flying saucer between buildings and detect danger. The idea of Future Combat Systems is to create a lighter, faster force that can react better to tomorrow's unpredictable foes.

The last time the Army tried anything so far-reaching was more than half a century ago when it introduced mechanized forces, moving soldiers en masse by machine rather than by foot, Army program officials say. "We are pushing the edge of technology," said Lt. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, a leader of the Army's modernization efforts.

A fiasco hastened the Army's commitment to modernize. In 1999, the Army was bogged down in muddy logistics as it sought to move Apache helicopters into Albania so they could be used in the Kosovo war. They didn't make it before the fight ended, an embarrassment that prompted then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki to declare that the service needed to get lighter and faster — quickly.

One of the devices being field-tested at Fort Bliss, Texas, is a robot called a Small Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or SUGV — 1,200 of an early version are being used in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials said. Built by iRobot, it weighs less than 30 pounds, runs on rubber tracks and features a long, flexible neck with a camera and sensors perched on top.

Soldiers, reared on video games, persuaded developers to let them use controllers similar to Microsoft's Xbox to remotely navigate the robots in caves, tunnels and sewers, where they have defused thousands of IEDs. Soldiers have become so enamored of the robot that they've nicknamed it "Johnny," given its resemblance to the robot in the "Short Circuit" movies.

Another new weapon is the Non-Line of Sight Launch System, a box of rockets that can automatically change direction in the air and hit a moving target about 24 miles away. The Army says it has never had a weapon like it. "It's not the Spartans with the swords anymore," says Emmett Schaill, a brigade commander at Fort Bliss.

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