Army seeks to replace combat vehicles After more than a decade of war, the Army wants to replace combat vehicles worn out from millions of miles in rugged terrain in Iraq and Afghanistan or blown up by roadside bombs.
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Its new personnel carriers must be safe enough for troops yet light and maneuverable enough to be deployed rapidly in support of the Obama administration’s shift in strategy away from long-term occupations.
Trying to develop a light truck and a heavy personnel carrier that do everything the Army wants won’t be cheap and could mean “we’re pricing ourselves out of land warfare,” says Andrew Krepinevich, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a non-partisan defense think tank. He regularly advises top Defense officials.
The future, instead, could mean repairs, not replacements.
“I wouldn’t gamble my house on those programs coming to fruition at the scale people are hoping,” says Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Federal budgets will be too tight, political support for major new weapons programs will be lacking, and industry hasn’t been able to deliver systems the Pentagon wants at a reasonable cost, Singer says.
“That triumvirate is setting them up for not complete replacement but more likely a series of upgrades to existing vehicles,” Singer says.
On the drawing board
The Army hasn’t had much luck in fielding new vehicles in recent years. The Army spent $18 billion to develop the Ground Combat Vehicle for its Future Combat System, only to scrap it in 2009 because it couldn’t protect from improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Another project, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle (JLTV) meant to replace the workhorse Humvee, has been on the drawing board for more than a dozen years and still is not in production.
Despite that history, Lt. Gen. William Phillips, a top Army weapons buyer, says the Army has learned its lessons and will be able to field affordable vehicles relatively quickly.
Now, Phillips said in an interview with USA TODAY, the Pentagon hopes to have an operational JLTV by 2016 that would have the Humvee’s maneuverability and the protection of the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) trucks credited with saving thousands of lives in Iraq and Afghanistan.
JLTV’s sticker price: about $300,000. An October 2011 report from the Government Accountability Office said, however, that meeting that price target “will be a challenge and will also likely depend on what type of contract the services award.”
The other vehicle, the proposed Ground Combat Vehicle, is a larger armored personnel carrier designed to ferry about nine soldiers around battlefields. Its anticipated cost is about $10 million apiece, about half previous estimates, Phillips says. It wouldn’t be ready for a mission until about 2019.
Both vehicles are essential to protecting troops from future threats, Phillips says.
However, as has been evident in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. enemies can blow up even the best armored vehicles with homemade bombs made from cheap fertilizer, Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told an audience in an address at Harvard in April.
“The issue here is not whether it costs $10 million or $17 million,” says Loren Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute and defense industry consultant. “When an enemy can destroy it for a couple hundred dollars, that’s the worst cost-exchange ratio I’ve ever seen.”
Thompson points out that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weren’t fought against front-line foes.
“We need to understand that we have been fighting very under-resourced adversaries,” Thompson says. “They nearly fought us to a standstill. What would a country with real capabilities do to us?”
Upgrading old vehicles
For the Army, the old may become new again. It has had some success retrofitting one combat vehicle, the Stryker. The Stryker is a lightweight armored personnel carrier. In Afghanistan, insurgent bomb attacks on Strykers regularly killed or wounded several soldiers. That changed when the Army attached V-shaped hulls to 256 Stryker vehicles, according to Phillips.
The V-shaped hull is the main feature of the MRAP trucks in Iraq and Afghanistan credited for saving lives because it directs the force from a buried bomb away from a vehicle’s center and away from the troops inside.
Retrofitted Strykers have performed well in Afghanistan, Phillips says. Of 41 Strykers hit by roadside bombs, three of them were breached badly enough for soldiers to be wounded or killed, he says, adding that they have saved “hundreds of lives.”
“We knew we had to do something to protect our soldiers better in the Stryker against IEDs, and the result of that was the double-V hull,” Phillips says.
And that’s fighting against a cheap weapon, Krepinevich says. Upgraded armor may not be enough to protect troops from high-tech, guided weapons that they’ll be likely to encounter in the future, he says. Insurgents in Iraq used armor-piercing weapons to blast holes in tanks and MRAPs.
Even if more armor did provide adequate protection, the heavy, bulky vehicles might not be able to navigate crowded cities where enemies may seek to fight U.S. forces, Singer says. Fighting among civilians negates the U.S. advantage in firepower and airpower because of the concern that American shells and bombs could kill innocent bystanders.