Slide 20 of 24

DoD and the Army is obsessed with the pursuit of personal ego gratification by ushering in Alvin and Heid Toffler's "Third Wave" of civilization where the physical doesn't count; all that matters is mentally mouse-clicking firepower precision ordnance. Afterwards, you mop up with troops in cheapo trucks. One of the false prophets of this "snake oil" was/is General Eric Shinseki. As Army Chief from 1999-2003, he oversaw outright lies and fabrications when the physical facts disputed his claims for his costly wheeled armored car units so the Army could continue to milk maximum money from Congress. That the Army was unready for Iraq II because the Army squandered $BILLIONS on these lemons for 4 years when for just a fraction of these funds we could have placed EVERY Soldier in a physically superior, up-armored M113 Gavin light track with the C4I computer packages Army Generals lust for, in a matter of days/weeks is morally bankrupt. Details:

Why DoD doesn't understand we are in the 4th Generation of War not a "third wave" utopia

The LAV Danger: Wheels are Failures in Combat

The announcement by the CSA General Shinseki in October 1999 to create Medium-sized Brigades and Divisions marks the end of the Cold War "Land Battleship" Army and the beginning of the "power projection" or "Airborne" U.S. Army. This is a good change for the Army, America and the defense of freedom. However, if we do not see clearly about who we are, and how we got to where we are today, we will not gain the terrain agile Medium force structure we need to defend freedom around the world by AIR deployment. The temptation to take the good concept of being a balanced medium combined-arms force and ruin it with road-bound wheeled armored cars that look new, different and sexy as its building blocks must be avoided at all costs.

Paul Hornback's Wheels vs. Tracks Article in the March-April 1998 issue of U.S. Army Armor magazine (before it became politicized) Warned Us Against the Wheeled SASO "Nation-Building" Racket EuroFad

Our warnings were not heeded in 1999 and we have suffered over 3, 400 dead and 24, 000 Americans in Iraq from the wheeled SASO truck madness.

We have a road-bound-in-closed-terrain force that the French lost with in Indo-China except it will be "high tech" victim wagons that are thinly armored and uses less logistics. It would rapidly deploy and become stuck on the ground restricted to overland movement on firm surfaces as a cunning enemy aware of our vulnerability to perceptions of futility could easily find an asymmetric way to exploit its many technotactical weaknesses. Then after a period of hand washing and finger pointing we would fall back to the status quo of preparing to relive WWII as we have often done in the past.

There has been a constant debate about track-laying tank size and weight since they were first introduced in WWI after wheeled armored cars clearly failed to make to, much less cross "no man's land". The real point is what can we do to enhance our all-terrain mobility and destructive power without making us so unprotected that we are an easy kill or tie us down with a huge vulnerable logistics tail to support. When the horse was the main form of mobility it was very successful for several thousand years. Then weapons advances made the horse unable to survive on the battlefield. This was taken to mean that mobility was dead. The slaughter of WWI was strictly a misunderstanding about mobility, because of course it was the horse who was through not mobility. If we don't understand this, the Army will fail. Mobility is the key to victory. The "land battleship" is fast coming to an end. It will have to do with costs more than anything but it will still fail. The Merkava is having it's problems in Lebanon and it's probably the outer limit of weight- to-power in a military vehicle. It's not fast enough to get out of the way, so it's an easy target for the newest missiles. We need a separate Cavalry branch of the U.S. Army or to rename Armor branch "Cavalry" to insure the Light and Medium weight AFVs General Shinseki gets for his Medium Brigades get used for terrain-agile operational maneuver not to duel other tanks or become "road pizza".

The "Land battleship" mentality is actually the German Tiger tank fears of the 1st Army under infantry-mentality General Courtney Hodges who had no operational maneuver. The fact is that 3d Army General George S. Patton never complained about Tiger tanks. 1st Army was on its tail (no operational maneuver) so Tiger tanks could COME TO THEM. General Patton's 3d Army always on the march, fought inside the enemy's decision making cycle (OODA loop) and never stood still long enough for the Germans to position and fuel their heavy Tiger tanks to threaten them. Today, we have our own "Tiger tank", the M1 Abrams 70-ton, fuel-gulping monster that we have to struggle to get to the fight, if the enemy doesn't play fair and give us lots of time to deploy, the American Tiger tanks sit at home in CONUS in the motor pool their crews watching CNN as M-84 medium tanks shell Kosovar villages. Strategically immobile and requires fueling at least twice a day and before every mission.

After Vietnam, everything that had to do with ACAVs, Armored Cavalry-----was killed--including Cav officers with combat experience...in the process we lost the light-AFV-in-difficult-terrain-combined-arms-team concept. Everyone wanted to put Vietnam past them---lets get heavy and fight the Russkies. Land battleship. The tank duel. The failed armor theories the French had in 1940, when the German blitzkrieg defeated them with operational maneuver. We desperately need the Cav back--the ACAV M113A3 for AIRBORNEcav capabilities--the Wiesel for Air Assault Cav capabilities----these are what we need to save the day like the M113 ACAVs did at Tan Son Nhut airbase, the U.S. embassy at Saigon---take a peek at the HBO film---"A Bright Shining Lie" on John Paul Vann for example. All a part of the 25th Light Infantry Division under General Weyand....how many light AFVs does the 25th LID have today? The 10th Mountain? The 101st Air Assault? The 82d Airborne? Can you say ZERO?

Today, Armor School is the proponent only for the tank battalion and the main battle tank, and it is sort of co-proponent for the M3 CFV and the 4.2" and 120mm SP battalion mortar. Yeah, some claim the ACR, too, but that's a stretch. Infantry School is proponent for IFVs, M113 APCs, and mortars. Field artillery is proponent for SP armored artillery. Engineers... etc.

Armor School is now developing the Tank Extended Range Munition (TERM), to turn the M1 Abrams into an indirect fire system, when mortars and artillery--tube, rocket and Enhanced fiber Optic guided Missile (EFOGM--15+km range versus TERM's 8 km) are more than adequately available? The M1 is already got a limited supply of 120mm ammo--just 44 rounds---and now we are reducing it by having it carry High-Explosive rounds because we didn't want to field a M113A3-based Combat Engineer Vehicle (CEV) to replace the old M728, and didn't want to field HMMWV fired EFOGMs for precision guided counter-arty and air. We are making the EXACT same mistake the Russians did with their tanks in the Chechan Republic! The Russians had a few rounds of building-busting rounds per tank when they needed a dedicated CEV. Its ad hocery to think Armor units are going to building/obstacle/bunker bust when even at JRTC they are not allowed to use simulate tank main gun ammo to breach. It will not be trained on, and if its not trained for, its dead. Who says the 120mm HEP rounds will even make it to M1 units in the field? "Putting all our eggs in the Land battleship basket" to keep the land mastadon alive at all costs. Now we will lose hundreds of men seizing a runway just so we can land the land mastadons---the German Airborne's critical WWII weakness that annihilated them. Isn't this deep down inside what the heavy-ists in the Army want? To kill the Light divisions?