As I watch the news each day, I can hardly get through a single half hour cycle without the subject of vehicle armor for the troops in Iraq coming up. While I agree, that our service members deserve the best protection that our nation can provide them, I think that the majority of lay-people watching this debate could benefit from some perspective on why things ended up this way and how it may not be as simple a matter as it seems.
I will begin by saying that this conflict is a new paradigm for the U.S. military. Never before has mobility been such an important component for all of our forces on the ground. The conventional military thought throughout the “Cold War” was to divide our land force structure into two categories: heavy and light. Heavy units were conceived around the concepts of battlefield mobility and survivability. The centerpiece of these units is the mighty
M1A2 Abrams tank. The Abrams’ supporting infantry units travel in
M2 Bradley IFV’s (Infantry Fighting Vehicles). These units are the Army’s main force, designed to slug it out toe to toe with the Soviet hordes in Germany’s Fulda Gap. These units are awesome in there capabilities, they can maneuver around their areas of operations much faster than troops on foot, carry unmatched firepower, and are very well protected from all but the most powerful enemy weapons. However, these units have two glaring flaws. First, they take literally months to deploy. Everything must be prepared and transported to the nearest port by rail, then loaded aboard ships, taken to the nearest friendly port to the battle front, and moved from there hundreds of miles to where they are ultimately needed. Second is that there are many environments where heavy armor is not always appropriate or effective, i.e., jungles, mountains, and under certain circumstances, urban areas. Oh yeah, they are incredibly expensive too.
Enter the light concept. Though lacking the mobility, firepower or survivability (actually, as I’ll discuss later, the survivability of dismounted light troops is very good by virtue of the fact that present much smaller targets to the enemy) of the heavies, they are much faster deploy, much cheaper to equip, and are far more flexible in complex terrain. Take the 82nd Airborne Division for example. The 82nd , by virtue of the fact that it has always had the requirement to be capable of projecting all of its combat power to the battlefield via parachute, has historically had very few vehicles as part of its normal compliment. The vehicles that it does have organic to it are necessarily light-weight (read unarmored) to facilitate ease of parachute insertion. This system has worked well for over fifty years because it reflected the capabilities required for what the unit was designed to do: rapid seizure of strategic targets (airfields mostly) anywhere on the planet within less than a day’s notice. The idea is once an airfield has been seized, it effectively opens up an “airhead” whereby a limited number of heavy forces may be air landed to reinforce the lightly equipped paratroopers.
For many years the 82nd made up for its lack of organic armor by utilizing a battalion of obsolete Vietnam-era armored reconnaissance vehicles (ARV) known as the
M551 Sheridan. Sheridans weren’t true tanks, their rolled aluminum armor could never withstand the punishment that a tank’s hull could take…but they did at least provide the paratroopers with two distinct advantages, they could be deployed by parachute, and they at least looked like tanks. In many situations, this was enough to keep the locals at bay. By the mid nineties, the Sheridans had become too long in the tooth to keep in service. They were far to slow to be practical on the modern battlefield and since they had been out of production for decades, spare parts were quickly drying up. They were to be replaced with the
M8 armored gun system (AGS), a true light tank as modern and capable as any system out there. However, post cold war budget cuts sealed the fate of this idea leaving the 82nd with no armor capability of its own.
In the late nineties, Army planners, Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki in particular, recognized the need for medium units combining the lethality and mobility of heavy units with the deployability of light units. This reflected the realities of post Soviet era military requirements. These brigades are based around a wheeled, armored combat vehicle known as a
Stryker (sorry Jack, it wasn’t named after Jeff), which is essentially an upgraded LAV25, already in use for years by the USMC. Unfortunately, as with any hybrid concept, there are always trade offs. The new units did fill the gap, but lacked the full capabilities of either of the earlier types.
Fast forward to Operation Iraqi Freedom. With the vast areas that needed to be covered by limited numbers of troops, and use of helicopters en-mass a risky (and expensive) proposition at best, it was determined that ground mobility was going to be the name of the game. It seemed that this was to be a war tailor made for the new Stryker Brigades. There was only one problem. There were none yet ready to go into combat, and even if they were, there were nowhere near enough of them to do the job. The solution? Make forces that are normally light, motorized. That is, equip soldiers that normally walk everywhere with trucks. The army experimented with this concept in the 1980’s with the now defunct 9th Infantry Division. For some reason, at the time it was considered to be a waste of resources. Given the doctrine of the era, it probably was. Anyway, this is how my company which normally only has one HMMWV pronounced "humvee")assigned to it, suddenly found itself in Kuwait with eighteen vehicles.
As I said before, there are always trade offs. Equipping a unit in such a way offers many obvious advantages, such as the ability to cover distances in minutes what would normally take hours, with troops arriving rested and ready to fight, and the ability to carry almost limitless amounts of ammunition and additional equipment. However, this arrangement also brings with it its own set of unique problems. For example, light infantry leaders such as myself, with no schooling in mounted warfare, had to re-learn almost everything. Basic skills such as land navigation and communications take on a very different dynamic at fifty miles per hour, with your elements spread out over distances measured in kilometers rather than mere meters. The biggest disadvantage is survivability.
A dismounted infantryman relies on his relative small size and agility to protect himself from enemy fire. When grunts make contact with the enemy they can disperse and seek cover, thereby mitigating the enemy’s ability to engage them. Usually a small rock or a shallow ditch provides more than enough protection from enemy fire. Obviously, one cannot do this as easily with a vehicle. The heavier units deal with this problem by utilizing heavily armored vehicles that can withstand enemy fire (such as the Bradley or Stryker) and can also be used as a fighting platform bringing an overpowering array of heavy weapon systems (25mm automatic cannon for example) to bear on the enemy. The HMMWV is a tactical vehicle, but certainly NOT a fighting vehicle. It is simply a carrier designed to move troops, weapons or equipment from point A to point B. It was never designed to be used directly in battle, but to move things around well to the rear of the front lines (of course in Iraq as with most modern conflicts, there are no front lines). Even the ones used as TOW (guided missile) platforms to hunt tanks use ambush tactics to avoid making direct contact. For this reason, they are, for the most part, not armored, nor were they designed to be.
I’ll use my own vehicle as an example. When I arrived in Kuwait I was issued a “rock-stock”
M998 HMMWV that according to its markings had belonged to the Rhode Island Army National Guard. She was an older model, lacking the beefed up suspension and engine of the newer types, but in overall excellent shape. Since I was in charge of a “weapons” squad with two M240B machine guns, since one of these was to be mounted on my truck, it was outfitted with a machine gun mount that was locally fabricated and installed under the supervision of the Army Materiel Command (AMC). This device alone weighed about a quarter ton. It did however, offer the advantage of adding 10mm of boiler plate steel to the floor of the bed. As had been done with tactical vehicles since the Vietnam war, we lined the floors with sandbags to mitigate the effects of mines. I stacked more sandbags along the side railings of the bed to add at least some protection for my gun crew, however I was mindful not to overdo it since my truck only had a maximum weight capacity of 2500lbs. I smeared mud over the woodland camouflaged paint to allow it to better blend with the desert environment and removed the fabric doors to allow ease of exit for myself and to allow maximum airflow in the 130 degree heat. Most of the vehicles in my unit were configured in this way sans gun mount. This setup seemed to me to be pretty good…not ideal, but pretty good. With a full combat load of men and equipment, I was right at the maximum weight limit. The truck was a bit sluggish, but it wasn’t struggling to haul the load. I thought that I had struck a fair balance between protection and mobility. Circumstances however, soon dictated drastic modification to this initial configuration.
Within seventy two hours of my unit’s arrival in Iraq,
Trevor Blumberg was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) while riding in the back of a HMMWV during a patrol just outside Falluja. The device had been fashioned from a South African 140mm artillery shell, and had been buried just beneath the surface of the road. No amount of sand bags could do anything against that kind if explosion. It lifted the entire vehicle several feet into the air.
I don’t blame the chain of command for reacting the way that they did. How could they face the family of the next soldier to get killed having done nothing to ensure that he was protected? Their initial solution was less than ideal. They ordered us to double the amount of sand bags on our vehicles. As we labored away at this task, I saw SSG Foster, Blumberg’s squad leader, who had been riding in the vehicle when it was destroyed, standing there watching us shaking his head. “ I tried to tell them that it wouldn’t have made any difference, but they wouldn’t listen.”
Of course he was right. It wouldn’t have made any difference at all. In fact, it only made us more vulnerable, since our vehicles, already operating at their limits began to literally break beneath the added weight. Our suspicions were confirmed a few weeks later when a M2 Bradley was destroyed by a similar device. We all knew what that meant. If these IEDs could take out a Brad’ then our HMMWVs are vulnerable regardless of how much shit we stack on them. So the question became this: Is it better to have the ability to move or to be weighed down with useless “protection”? To us, the answer was clear. Slowly, sandbags began to get “lost” from the backs of vehicles and they weren’t being replaced.
About a month later, my first sergeant came up with a brilliant solution. Each unit was given several thousand dollars a day to improve their living standards. The idea was that it was a good way to pump much needed money into the local economy and improve morale at the same time. We used the money to buy air conditioners, washing machines, television sets, and things of that nature. The first sergeant thought, why not pay local contractors to weld steel plate onto our vehicles? Why not indeed. We took several different samples of scrap steel of various thickness and shot them up with a captured AK. In this way, we determined the thickness that offered the best protection to weight ratio. We had a prototype truck fitted with the new armor and the results were spectacular. Weight was reduced drastically and we at least now had some protection from most small arms fire. Once the brigade headquarters found out about our project, they opened a contract to have every vehicle in the taskforce refitted. Suddenly, we looked like something out of a Mad Max movie or an episode of the A-Team. The trucks were still grossly overloaded, but after the whole sandbag fiasco, they seemed to run like racecars.
As the deployment progressed, some aftermarket armor upgrades made of Kevlar began to filter down the pipe…but never in large quantities and by then it was largely a moot point anyway. Eventually, we received doors cut from German Armox ballistic steel. Although they could supposedly withstand .50 caliber fire (a claim to which I am still doubtful), I never cared for these doors for several reasons. One, because I actually preferred being in the open. I trusted my the Kevlar and ceramics of my body armor more than steel plates to protect me. I favored having no doors because it meant that I could ride “side saddle”,. I could scan the side of the road for enemy activity and shoot if necessary. Also, this arrangement allowed me to spring from my vehicle quickly so that I could react to whatever situation presented itself. Being seat belted in behind these massive plates prevented that. The doors also were a pain in the ass because they would rattle and often break loose. As I said 998’s were not designed to be armored. The mountings were built for light weight doors of fabric or fiberglass, not 120lb slabs of homogenous steel. When I was ordered to have them installed, I sited the assassination of Alfred Herrhausen, head of Deutche Bank, by terrorists of the Red Army Faction in 1989, and received only blank stares. Ok, ok, I’ll explain myself. Herr Herrhausen was riding in an armored limousine in Gemany when he was killed. A roadside IED hidden in a book bag on a bicycle detonated and sent his armor plated door into him killing him almost instantly.
My unit did have two purpose built
“up armored” HMMWVs. These vehicles were designed during the nineties for peace keeping operations after the debacle in Mogadishu and are essentially ten thousand pound armored cars. They were built from the ground up as armored vehicles and feature heavy-duty suspensions and supercharged engines. They each have a reinforced frame with a rotating machinegun cupola, and are completely encased in Kevlar, steel and bullet-proof glass. The primary flaws of this type of vehicle are that their excessive weight which causes them to get stuck more readily than a standard HMMWV, and their limited seating capacity. For me, the latter was not an issue since I seldom carried more than five personnel on my vehicle anyway. So although it was not a universal solution to our units needs, it did make a fine weapons platform which was good enough for me. These vehicles had other goodies such as GPS uplinks built in. One of the missions that performed regularly was as “advanced guard”…essentially, going ahead of the main element scout out the route. The vehicle excelled in this role.
I used them whenever possible, although it was mainly for my crew’s benefit. I personally felt like some sort of half-assed cosmonaut strapped into this hermetically sealed tin can with a clip board on my knee, multiple radios chattering in my ear and an illuminated touch screen in my face. There was literally no room. I could not move. If I dropped something I could not retrieve it from the floor without getting out altogether (which in itself was no small task). I could not see anything except what was directly ahead or to my immediate right. I had to rely on my gunner to be my eyes. I didn’t care for that. My crew on the other hand, loved these things. They had seen them hit
antitank mines in Afghanistan, and although the vehicles were of course destroyed, their crews always walked away from them. They are impressive machines, and psychologically my soldier’s confidence in them made a huge difference during a patrol. They were free to concentrate on the task at hand and worry less about their own safety.
I guess that is what this whole armor issue is about: confidence. Most of us that have been there realize damn well that the armor is ultimately a placebo. It will not always protect against the two biggest threats that our vehicles face: IEDs and rocket propelled grenades (RPGs). Personally, I prefer the speed and off road handling that a light weight vehicle affords. This does not absolve Congress, the Pentagon, and ultimately the American people from ensuring that these things are provided for our service members who are putting their asses on the line. Soldiers FEEL MORE CONFIDENT in an armored vehicle. Confidence is crucial to success in combat. And yes, this armor does indeed save lives...almost daily. Isn’t that worth a few million? We are the United States For Christ’s sake… The richest nation on earth. During WW2 we stopped building cars just to build tanks and airplanes for the war effort. Surely we can produce a few thousand purpose built armored trucks that suit our tactical needs? I know they exist,
I’ve seen them. Cost be damned. Wouldn’t you want your kid to have the best protection money could buy?
