Today, an article of mine appeared in AOL Defense, a promising new online publication founded just last month but helmed by the eminently savvy Colin Clark, formerly the driving force of the must-read website DoD Buzz. The story is essentially a reported editorial arguing in favor of a struggling Army program called the Ground Combat Vehicle. While the piece doesn’t quote directly from my oral history interviews, it draws heavily on them and on my decade of covering the Army’s agonies trying to develop new armored fighting vehicles:
Click here to see the full story, exclusively at AOL Defense.
And click below for some relevant past articles of mine from the National Journal archives:
Army Tries Again For A New Tank: the value of heavy armor in counterinsurgency – August 7, 2010
The Army Looks Beyond Afghanistan: lessons ofAfghanistan andIraq for Army modernization – December 12, 2009
The Military’s New Hybrid Warriors: waging war while winning hearts and minds – March 14, 2009
Army Struggles Toward Goal Of Wi-Fi Infantry: advanced battlefield communications – September 20, 2008
Commuting to War: why tactics, not armor, made Humvees vulnerable – March 24, 2007
Future Tank: lessons of Iraq for modernizing armored vehicles – September 16, 2006
Readers are welcome to comment below.
3 Comments
Do differences in terrain between the Army’s changing “theaters of interest” help to explain the changes in its ground combat vehicle designs? In the 1980s the Army assumed its next ground war was going to be in Germany, and designed the Bradley to protect infantrymen from Eastern Bloc small-arms fire and chemical attacks on the central German plain. In the 1990s, the theater of interest was Iraq, which probably helps explain the development of the Stryker. I suspect the Army never planned to fight in a mountainous region like Afghanistan*, where vehicular mobility is low and there are ample sites for ambushes. Perhaps the best solution is to rely less on armored vehicles and more on jetpacks.
I’m only half joking. The Bradley AFV, incidentally, is famously problematic and has been since its introduction. The HBO movie THE PENTAGON WARS gives a shallow but entertaining summary of the
slovenly way in which the M2 was designed and tested.
* IIRC, The Army did plan to take part in the 1999 campaign against Yugoslavia, but only with attack helicopters.
The original Bradley was definitely underarmored — and made of aluminum, which CATCHES FIRE. As uparmored for Operation Desert Storm (let alone today’s uparmor kits), it’s pretty solid.
But you’re entirely right that the Bradley was designed for WWWIII in West Germany. Specifically, that’s a defensive fight against hordes of Soviet tanks and other armored vehicles, which meant the premium was on tank-killing systems, in the Bradley’s case the TOW anti-tank missile launcher which the vehicle is built around, supplemented by the 25 mm chain gun to kill lightly armored vehicles (e.g. BMP infantry carriers). Actually fitting infantrymen inside was kind of an afterthought; they were basically there to serve as what I believe the Germans in WWII called “escort troops,” i.e. relatively small infantry detachments that accompanied armored vehicles to provide close-in defense against enemy infantry (in the German case, escort troops were largely for assault guns, which have no traversable turret and therefore lousy close-in defense). Likewise, the only mines the Bradley was expected to encounter were OUR mines, laid to stop the Soviet onslaught, so underbody armor against mines took second place to frontal armor against attacking enemy guns — and the vehicle was designed to be as low to the ground as possible to present a small target to guns, which means the underbody is very close to any blast going off underneath. Acceptable tradeoffs for WWIII, but terrible when you’re in urban combat and your chief worries are surviving roadside bombs hitting from below and having enough infantry on hand to clear buildings.
As for the Styker, that was indeed designed with Iraq 1990 in mind, and also Kosovo 1999, because in both cases the Army was unable to rapidly deploy armored ground forces: What we got to Saudi Arabia in a hurry was the 82nd Airborne, which had no armored vehicles at all and almost no transport of any kind, whereas all the armored units were so heavy that they had to come by sea. The Stryker was intended as a medium weight vehicle, light enough to deploy rapidly by air but heavy enough to provide decent protection. The irony is that it’s never been deployed anywhere by air, and in fact has been uparmored beyond what the intended transport, the C-130, can carry, but it’s proven a highly successful infantry carrier in Iraq. While lighter than a Bradley, it’s a hell of a lot heavier than even an uparmored Humvee. Even better, an unintended consequence of it being a wheeled vehicle rather than tracked is that its suspension requires a much higher ground clearance, which gives blasts from below room to dissipate somewhat before hitting the hull. And finally, another advantage wheels have is that underbody blasts can vent out between tires more easily than through tracks.
That said, wheels are inferior to tracks off-road — the ground pressure is too high — and can’t support a vehicle much heavier than the current Stryker. That’s why any GCV is going to be a tracked vehicle.
And the latest GCV SNAFU: the traditional protest to GAO from a losing contractor puts the whole program on hold.
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