Earlier I gave you some notes I took on the forecasted expenditures of the services for armor products. The analyst from Vector Strategy also went into the forecasted expenditures of armored materials, including steel, ceramics and aramid fiber armors. But I thought that stuff was a bit speculative, so I won’t pass it along unless any of you email me for it.
What she did talk about, however, were some “issues” that could affect her assumptions on materials and expenditures — things that could raise or lower the amounts or contribute to the creation of a whole new category of material demands and dollars spent.
Some of those issues include:
- The Army’s “grow the force” initiative: will the Army’s expansion from 70 to 76 Brigade Combat Teams include Stryker-equipped ones or will they be infantry combat teams with less armor-intensive equipment? The service has not yet decided.
- Similar to the grow the force issues are the services efforts to transform its current forces into BCTs — the so-called “modularization” initiative: Again, how many and how heavy vehicles will each of the BCTs and their support and coordinated units need?
- There are two ongoing studies being hammered out by the services on the future of their tactical wheeled vehicle plan — one at the behest of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, the other at the insistence of DepSecDef Gordon England: What will these two studies say for future armored vehicle acquisition plans? How many JLTVs vs uparmored Humvees vs Strykers vs other new manned armored ground vehicles will the Army and Marine Corps buy?
- EFP-resistant upgrades: The services are still determining how many Humvees will require the Frag Kit #6 upgrades for greater EFP protection and how many of the Army’s M113 ASVs will get the new Frag Kit #3 for the same resistance. Of course, the number and mix of MRAPs plays into this fudge factor.
- Marine Corps tactical vehicles: How many JLTVs, MRAPs and Humvee ECVs (expanded capacity vehicle) will the Corps buy? This will surely affect the quantity and types of armor needed from the market.
- The big question mark is the future of the Future Combat Systems: What mix of Bradley, Abrams other upgrades or new buys will the Army include in its overall manned ground vehicle future plans for FCS? There’s a lot of question surrounding the future of the FCS plan and what will survive in this seemingly unwieldy program. We know NLOS is protected (thanks to Sen. Inhofe of Oklahoma where Fort Sill is located) but what of the troubled FCS ground vehicles will make it through technical and budget chops?
- Lastly, the Army’s plan to replace the M113 ASV: It’s in the 2010–2015 POM, but it’s anyone’s guess what will be the final choice.
Up next: Carbon nanotubes and their influence on the armor market.
– Christian
i dont get this obsession with wheels. its stupid imo. insurgent tactics often use medium machine gun fire on the front and the rear of convoys to keep them in the kill zone. run flat isnt going to do shit after you just pumped a tire full of 100 rounds of 7.62. also tires easily catch on fire and can start fires inside the vehicle. also if you know anything about engineering when you add heavy armor to a truck with axles you have to increase the axle strength which in turn you need to then add a bigger engine which wastes more fuel. you get into this viscous circle of adding more weight to your truck. seems to me again the dod is providing half solutions to problems.
Man, what is that thing, and where can I buy it…thats exactly what I need for my new family vehicle!
Its a truck, not an APC or an IFV. If you are running around in a hot zone that hot, you probably need IFVs and APCs. If its not that hot a location, then maybe a truck would be a good idea…then again, maybe you WANT every military vehicle to be an armored tank…you never know.
Yup. We need an “old Sailor” making recommendations on ground force makeup. :->
Each situation calls for it’s own mix of equipment.
Ok. I usually stay out things like thins but “old sailor” has tweaked my nose somewhat. I came up in the old army and I have seen the brass make many a stupid and senseless decision and then give that senseless and stupid advice to politicians who sometimes followed it and sometimes not. The Iranian hostage rescue ring a bell? Carter followed to the letter what the brass said would do the mission. Yeah, right. The brass hats aren’t always correct, no one is. Was Rumsfeld correct in all of his decisions, no? Nevertheless, if the pentagon had their way we would still be sitting in Germany guarding against an imaginary threat with legacy equipment that is ill suited to today
The problem with tracked vehicles is they chew up the road real good, you can drive wheeled vehicles on city streets and not have the repair crew driving behind you filling the potholes.
Anyways, tracked vehicles are unnecessary when you have streets.
I don’t like Rumsfeld,I think he sucked big time.But so did Cheney when he was Sec.Def. & let us not forget Les Aspin during the 90s.For a culture that stresses “balance” & “yin & yang,” we sure don’t seem to have either.The one thing that the Crusader Howitzer had was a longer gun barrel(L55-caliber) for greater distances.The Paladin,for all of its upgrades(including a Bradley chassis) still has the same little barrel(L39-caliber) that it has had since the 60s or before even that.The “International” version has a L52-caliber barrel,why can’t our domestic version also have a longer barrel? What “divine” wisdom has proclaimed that “L39-caliber” is good enough?
I guess wheeled armored vehicles are good enough.…for a “domestic” gendarme force which I wonder if that is what our army is being reduced to?
Jeff M
With new band tracks you can travel stealthy, faster, double your fuel range, and not tear up the roads, they should move to bands tracks for all tracks.
check it out over here on youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbWbkOkTydk
I still want to know what that beast is in the pic. Looks like a mine resistant hulled Humvee. Turkey uses something similar IIRC (Humvee guts, but a better hull including the angled armor plating to deflect mine/IED blasts instead of the flat bottom that the Humvee has).
Ok Old Trooper! I never said that the old, heavy Army was all we ever needed. (BTW, I worked as an engineer on the Crusader project over 3 years; that’s why I have an interest in and some knowledge of Army vehicles.)
What I object to is the idea that was being proposed half a dozen years ago by Rumsfeld and others like Cheney: that the old heavy armored and tracked vehicles like the M1 should all be done away with in favor of “lighter, faster, more lethal (supposedly) etc” vehicles with wheels and weigh only 20 tons or so.
The discussion on this website concerning carbon nanotubes for tank armor is exactly what makes those ideas so ridiculous. Even today, trying to come up with armor that gives the same or better protection than the depleted-uranium armor on the M1 and only weighs 20 tons or so is impossible. No problem, except Rummy was trying to make it happen RIGHT NOW (this decade), not 20–30 years down the road. Talk about forcing the Army to commit suicide before even going to war. If he had succeeded in creating his all-“lighter, faster, etc” army and then gone to war with it, we would have been in a real mess with a lot more dead soldiers than we already have. Thankfully, the Army and Pentagon has seen the “light” and things are going the other direction now.
The Crusader is also a great point: even before reducing the weight down to less than 30 tons as the Pentagon was demanding, the armor wouldn’t protect the crew against anything more powerful than an artillery fragment, let alone a roadside bomb or maybe an RPG. It was laughably flimsy to start with, the idea being that hey, the Crusader would be way behind the lines anyway, so it wouldn’t matter. Whoops, then came Iraq and roadside bombs. True, it deserved to be terminated or reworked on a number of grounds like being vulnerable to things like roadside bombs, but not for the reasons given. Rummy just needed an excuse to divert the funds to other programs is all.
I believe the Crusader technology of MRSI (multiple rounds, simultaneous impact) is still needed by the Army, because we will be going to war again someday, and it won’t be against some third-world banana republic. Air support cannot do everything.
I’m out of date on the current state of the FCS, but probably it’s going to happen there.
Old Sailor,
The FCS N-LOS cannon is supposed to go into full production in a year or two. From what I understand, they basically took the cannon from the Crusader and reworked it to fit on the N-LOS cannon. I don’t know what the eventual distribution will be, but I think they need to replace every Paladin battalion with it.
CoolHand77,
the vehicle in the photo is a prototype for the JLTV, or Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, which may replace the humvee in the next few years. I believe the one in the photo is General Dynamic’s submission.
3-way tie for worst SecDef ever: Johnson, McNamara, Rumsfeld.
TB,
The vehicle in the pic is the MillenWorks LUV. It’s the Textron/Boeing/MillenWorks JLTV offering.