Для Кирасира пр. автомобилеведов - вся правда о Хамви в Ираке (на анг.)
Хотелось бы услышать и комментарий на это дело.
Soft-skin Army getting clobbered in Iraq, part 1: the HMMWV truck
With now over 200 dead American Soldiers, its time we face the truth that our Army and marines are poorly organized and equipped for 21st century non-linear conflicts. Our current land forces are designed for non-existent linear conflicts where huge land forces march on an enemy capital and thoroughly clear out all enemy pockets of resistance as in WWII. While this took place "safe rear areas" were created where Soldiers could shuttle supplies back and forth inside unarmored, rubber-tired trucks manifesting itself today in the ever-present and extremely vulnerable 5-9,000 pound HMMWV and 22,000 pound FMTV type trucks. This is not WWII with 100 Divisions of U.S. Army troops, this is 2003 and the enemy's center of gravity can be knocked out with concentrated maneuver forces, but the stability afterwards has to be won with an enemy coming from ANY direction. There are no "safe" rear areas in 4th Generation warfare.
The central idea that the Army's utility vehicle be an unarmored HMMWV truck is incorrect and Soldiers are now dead from repeated ambushes. The idea that general tasks can be done with a mass-produced, unarmored truck is one driven by economy and cheapness with a subtle idea that the other option a tracked vehicle will wear out if tasked to do this. The myth that a rubber-tired vehicle can scoot around large areas without break down to have "operational mobility" comes from ignorance of basic laws of physics and experience with what light tracked armored vehicles can do. The Army is now losing its shirt replacing rubber tires that are busting in Iraq.
The U.S. Army at one time was much smarter and better equipped for non-linear combats when it was a M113 Gavin AFV Army til the early 1980s with the advent of the HMMWV and the too-heavy for general use M1/M2 family of heavy AFVs. Now we have light units in HMMWVs getting clobbered in combat without ANY armored vehicles and heavy AFV units that cannot roam around as needed without wearing their tracks out. In stark contrast, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) right now at the bare minimum moves its troops around non-linear battlefields in light tracked M113 Gavins with armor protection against small arms and with applique armor RPGs. The IDF is not losing a man a day like we are in Iraq.
Its high time the U.S. Army relearn that a light tracked AFV should be the primary troop carrier for ALL its units in combat situations not the horrible HMMWV. A light tracked M113 Gavin AFV (under 11 tons) with current steel tracks can go anywhere, swim, be airlifted to include helicopters, and with a light 8.63 PSI ground pressure get 10,000 miles on its tracks which will not bust daily as rubber tires do. The maneuverists who lust for the rubber-tired LAV/Stryker armored cars need to go back through their notes to their favorite 1940 fall of France battle and realize that "operational mobility" they are so quick to praise as necessary to knock out enemy centers of gravity was done by TRACKED light tanks that could go cross country through the "impassable" Ardennes forest not road-bound, fragile armored cars. Study the ACRs in Vietnam, their combat experiences with M113 Gavin operational mobility saved the day during the Tet offensive and saved Saigon.
The quickest way to get M113 Gavins in Army light infantry units is to re-equip their Delta Companies with 30+ light tracked AFVs so they can now give A, B and Charlie companies armored mobility as needed. When not used for troop transports the M113 Gavin's armored mobility renders better firing positions for Delta companies during anti-tank missions.
If we have folks who cannot accept the M113 Gavin because its not new, they need to go take a look at the B-52. Planet earth doesn't care about fashion, all that matters is what works. The unarmored HMMWV truck and rubber-tired armored car do not work in combat against violent humans. The light tracked AFV, the M113 Gavin does and it needs to become the prime troop carrier in the U.S. Army via modest upgrades other smarter armies have done to keep its men alive and get the job done in a violent world.
Getting clobbered in Iraq part 2
Where are the gunshields?
"Go to the ant, you sluggard; consider its ways and be wise! It has no commander, no overseer or ruler, yet it stores its provisions in summer and gathers its food at harvest. Four things on earth are small, yet they are extremely wise: Ants are creatures of little strength, yet they store up their food in the summer."
Proverbs 6:6, 30:24-25
One summer's day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart's content. An Ant passed by, bearing an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.
"Why not come and chat with me," said the Grasshopper, "instead of toiling in that way?"
"I am helping to lay up food for the winter," said the Ant, "and recommend you do the same."
"Why bother about winter?" said the Grasshopper; "we have plenty of food now."
The Ant went on its way. When winter came the Grasshopper had no food and found itself dying of hunger, while it saw the ants distributing corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer.
Our Soldiers are dying in Iraq today because we squandered billions of dollars and 4 years of preparation time on defective Canadian-made Stryker wheeled armored cars sitting idle at Fort Lewis like fad-conscious "grasshoppers" when our men could have been better protected had we diligently economized and upgraded like "ants" our existing and superior M113 Gavin tracked armored fighting vehicles (AFVs) at half the cost and time that are actually in combat in Iraq; thereby insuring we had enough money to buy the body armor our troops need for the Afghanistan/Iraq wars. We chatted about "transformation" instead of making actual war capability improvements until the enemy struck on 9/11/01. We could whine about the difficult geo-political situation our Soldiers are in, but that's evading the truth that the supposedly "world's best military" needs to better anticipate the future and diligently use its resources to prevail regardless. For the first-time since Somalia, U.S. Soldiers are occupying a country that is not fully glad to see them there. In the past, after a brief war to overthrow a bad government, U.S. forces could switch into a docile peacekeeping mode, not right now in Iraq. So let's face the problem, head-on shall we?
The U.S. military is populated by egotistical types of people. Like "grasshoppers" these people in peacetime make decisions based on feel-good style and not substance; the Army can be seen as divided into two sub-camps; light and heavy. The light people think they can walk free of having to care for motor vehicles anywhere on the battlefield and not need any armor protection; they look down on the heavy people who fight from armored vehicles. If the wars are in closed terrain, don't last too long, the enemy is not difficult, light infantry can prevail with light casualties. However, lo and behold you have to cross hundreds of miles of open desert, you can't walk far with only the water you can carry on your back. We discover we "need" the heavy forces we disparaged with words like "legacy" because they toil in a motor pool more than they do sports PT to look sexy for the opposite sex. The heavy people are to blame for not wanting to take risks in anything less than very heavy vehicles too hard to fly to a fight so the light M113 Gavin AFVs our Army needs to move the light infantry and resupply ourselves on the non-linear battlefield are neglected. Then came Iraq. In open terrain without cover and closed terrain of cities full of lurking gunmen, we discover we can't mouse-click steer firepower (Tofflerian RMA mentality) to hold the ground and the peace, either. Holding this contested ground with light infantry without ANY armored vehicles, we are losing our men to gunmen, snipers, RPGs, and grenades. In the years leading up to the second Iraq war, light infantrymen refused to wear body armor in training saying they were overloaded (they are more on this later). Then came Somalia and the Ranger Regiment was rescued from soft-skin vehicle annihilation by armored vehicles and hard body armor that could stop rifle bullets, called "Ranger Body Armor" to make it acceptable. The full post-Somalia response should have been requesting war-stock M113 Gavin light tracked armored vehicles instead of continuing to drive around in easily destroyed rubber-tired HMMWV and LandRover trucks--but Ranger egotism will not allow this, to admit you need armor protection means you are less of a man. However, the current rifle-caliber resistant body armor, "Interceptor Body Armor" (IBA) has saved many lives in Afghanistan and now Iraq and the other troops of our Army unashamedly want IBA even though there is not enough to go around.
Why is there not enough IBA to go around?
There is not enough IBA for all our troops because before the war in our peacetime training fantasy our egotism and lack of professional understanding of the battlefield did not make it a priority (i.e. we squandered our money on defective Stryker armored cars). It should not take getting shot at to make a so-called professional to see the need for armor on the automatic weapons fire-swept battlefield. But the basic problem with arrogance is a lack of RESPECT for others; when you look down on the other half of the Army, is it a surprise you do not respect the enemy? If you do not respect the enemy as a clever human being, though fighting for an evil cause, you don't "what-if" what he can do to you weapons-wise and you don't take counter-measures like armor protecting yourself. As stated in the first article, the force structure of our light infantry that lacks ANY tracked armored mobility that depends on unarmored soft-skin vehicles for re-supply is madness on the current non-linear battlefield. This can be quickly fixed by outfitting our light units with the world's greatest and easiest to maintain light tracked AFV, the M113 Gavin which waits in the wings by the thousands to rescue our Army from its descent into all-or-nothing Light/Heavy madness that took place at the dawn of the '80s. By canceling the overweight, road-bound, thinly armored Stryker "medium" rubber-tired armored car one-size-fits-all delusion, we can save over $9 BILLION dollars and be able to buy every Soldier in harm's way IBA and upgrade their M113 Gavins into "A4" models with RPG applique' armor, chemi-bio-nuclear air filtration systems, digital firepower/situational awareness, a shoot-on-the-move autocannon 1-man turret, band-tracks and hybrid-electric drive for stealth and 60 mph road speeds. We would have the best general purpose troop and supply armored transport possible on planet earth in 2003. 50% of an Army Heavy Division moves by M113 Gavins now, all we have to do is fully exploit their full potential throughout the rest of the Army to make its men and its supplies mobile on tracks with basic armor protection like the IDF wisely does.
Why is our Infantry on foot overloaded?
Once we respect the enemy, the earth itself, we can properly employ and develop future Army ground vehicles, creating the best force mixes possible with what we can do today and in the near future. However, we can't fight successfully only while mounted in armored vehicles because there are simply too many places that are inaccessible to any vehicle in a tactically prudent manner that require foot troops to secure. Here again, the light-itis egotism strikes again; lacking a force-on-force feedback war game system that requires ANSWERS, the light infantry revels in its overloaded weights it carries and its heavy casualties it takes in peacetime MILES "laser tag" training. Now that the bullets are real, they are born-again believers in rifle-caliber bullet resistant IBA. However, due to a lack of intelligent focus on the individual Soldier's load---actual thinking and tinkering to get loads under 40 pounds to get 4-7+mph foot mobility--not hubristic chest beating to be "tough"-----Soldiers really are overloaded more than ever before. If you are a slow moving target you can be more easily aimed in on by the enemy and hit. The ability to be nimble and evade being hit is not a solution to everything, look at how the light infantry without body armor has failed in those unavoidable situations where you don't have cover/concealment to cling to: deserts and urban areas when you are supposedly at "peace". Since we do not weigh our loads and try to trim them and move them creatively (M113 Gavin AFVs, bikes, carts, pack mules, ATVs) to get tactical speed march benefits, its not surprising that we are carrying unnecessary and overly heavy items into the field for comfortable living. Then when actual ammo loads are carried plus IBA Soldier mobility goes to nil. The solution here is to Army-wide change the current sports PT test to a 6 mile 30-pound ruck march in full combat gear for time with dummy ammunition. Whenever ANY Soldiers go to the field they carry their basic dummy load of ammunition. This will force Natick Labs, private industry and leaders to find and use lighter field living means than our current bloated tentage. The majority of the 30 pound weight of the rucksack should be ammunition and water. An Army that trains as it would fight will not be surprised when it has to carry ammo and wear IBA.
Are we a "hard" or "soft" target for the enemy?
While we are reorganizing our Army to use armored tracked vehicles for troop transport/resupply in the new non-linear warfare paradigm, we will be stuck using soft-skin trucks---its way overdue but THE BEST sandbagging procedures for both the HMMWV and FMTV trucks need to be determined and published immediately throughout the Army like the diagram in FM 90-5 Jungle operations. The FMTV truck stands so tall over its rubber tires it needs a ladder for the troops to get out--this is unacceptable---we need to find a way to rope the rear ramp in an open position at an angle so troops can flop down and slide off onto the ground for faster dismounting. The M197 pedestal machine gun mount needs to be on several of EVERY Army unit's HMMWVs so M249 LMGs are employed in a ready-to-fire manner. Sandbagging, anti-mine hardening and weapons mounting, Escape and Recovery training needs to be standard in ALL convoy operations and this should be a CTT task done by every Army unit each year. This should have already been SOP throughout the Army, we are running late and men and women are dead.
Armored MP HMMWVs now are getting gunshields, the officer with the foresight to push this forward should be promoted. Gunners exposed firing machine guns from vehicles are vital to convoy defense--the enemy knows this, fires back and they are killed. The Russians know this and open their AFV hatches FORWARD so they act as shields and have bullet deflectors in front of their driver's hatches. Our AFVs don't have these protective features. The U.S. Army learned the need for gunshields at the 1963 battle of Ap Bac, created gunshield kits for its M113 Gavins but they languish now in supply warehouses because during peacetime the egotistical Soldier doesn't respect the enemy and since it takes more work/red tape to mount gunshields he doesn't. Every M113 Gavin right now in combat in Iraq should immediately be fitted with the TC's gunshield kit. The already too high Bradley AFV with its huge 2-man turret has neither forward opening hatches or gunshield kits:
Yesterday evening, a sniper killed a U.S. Soldier who was standing in the gunner's hatch of a Bradley fighting vehicle while guarding the national museum in Baghdad. Yesterday the museum opened its doors for a few hours - the first time since the war. The Soldier was evacuated to a military hospital, but died of his wounds. Attackers detonated an explosive on a highway in Baghdad's western outskirts yesterday, injuring three passengers in a civilian car and two U.S. Soldiers traveling in a Humvee convoy, according to an Associated Press photographer on the scene. On Thursday, US troops near Baqubah, north-east of the capital, attempted to draw out attackers by luring them into an ambush on a stretch of road known as "RPG Alley" because of its frequent rocket-propelled grenade strikes. One suspect was killed and three captured in the operation, said Lieutenant Kurt Chapman, with the Army's 4th Infantry Division. "We're trying to be a little bit more proactive and find them before they get us," Chapman said. Compare this to the fact that we have known for YEARS that Chechan snipers have focused in on AFV crewmen and at JRTC OPFOR successfully does the same to U.S. Army troops yet no gunshields for M1 Abrams or M2 Bradley AFVs. The M113 Gavin gunshields are not mounted. Compare this tragic story to the IBA success story described in the "Small Arms and Individual Equipment Lessons Learned" gathered from 5 through 10 May 2003 from Soldiers serving in the Baghdad sector during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Comments came from Brigade Commanders down to riflemen. The following units were interviewed:
Interceptor Body Armor: Soldiers have great confidence in their body armor. As one battalion commander stated "Soldiers felt comfortable 'trolling for contact' because they felt their body armor provided sufficient protection." There were numerous comments about comfort and weight but, in general, comments were positive. The comfort comments dealt mainly with maneuverability. Soldiers indicated that it was difficult to maintain a good prone firing position while wearing the IBA with plates. Their Kevlar [helmet] interfered with the back of the vest and it was difficult to keep your head up while prone. Also, the plates made it difficult to seat the stock of the weapon into the shoulder as Soldiers are trained. The foam impact pad in the Airborne Soldier's Kevlar [helmet] further exacerbated the problem of contact between Kevlar and vest. Most importantly however, is the performance demonstrated by the IBA during the operation. There were numerous examples of impacts that could have been fatal that resulted in minor or no injury to the Soldier. The A/3-69 AR XO's tank responded to a threat to the field trains of about 60 dismounted enemy. While engaging the enemy with the 7.62 MG, the loader felt an impact to his chest that knocked him back into the turret. He told the XO he had been hit. The XO checked him for a wound, found none and directed him to continue to engage the enemy. After the fight they found the entry hole to the IBA, significant damage to the edge of the SAPI plate and a 7.62 round embedded in the protective liner of the OTV. Other soldiers in A/3-69 AR made fun of the loader above because he wore an IBA inside the turret of an M1 until he was hit in the chest and survived. Vehicle crewman expressed a desire for similar protection. Some of the Soldiers we interviewed said IBA was suitable for the turret. Others said it was not. Due to the nature of the threat, M1 and M2 crews spent a significant amount of time exposed in the hatches, engaging dismounted enemy around their vehicles, as they pushed through. Vehicle crewmen took it upon themselves to modify their issued Spall Vest to increase the protection. One crewman in 3-7 CAV took the protective pads from three different spall vests and put them into one. The Soldiers in 3-69 AR found they could put IBA SAPI plates into the spall vest.
Where is our Soldier face, neck and eye protection?
"May 16, 2003: More medical reports indicate that the new Interceptor protective vest was, indeed, bullet proof. Only nine percent of the combat wounds to 118 Army casualties were in the trunk, and these were either by larger caliber weapons or shots that came in at odd angles and got around the Interceptor (like via an armpit.) Autopsies of 154 dead Soldiers showed that the single most common area hit was the head (neck and face, the rest is well protected by the Kevlar helmet.) The next largest category is multiple wounds, including ones that sever major [arteries] in the arms, and most dangerously, in the legs."
Non-linear war requires a paradigm change; another that must change is the current SLA Marshall men-against-fire mentality that units that are pinned down by enemy fire are helpless and can only be rescued others not pinned down. In the days before bullets infantry had SHIELDS. Over the years larger weapons like artillery pieces, machine guns and rocket launchers have had gunshields to protect their Soldiers employing them to get a line of sight to hit their targets. We have the technology today to take an Interceptor Body Armor plate proof against 7.62mm bullets and attach it to the end of our rifles and machine guns to be a man-portable gunshield. The 1st TSG (A) has created a working prototype " http://www.combatreform.com/gunshield.htm". We should not have to fight an uphill battle against small minded egotism and can't-do to field small gunshields on our Soldiers in harm's way now in Iraq. Portable gunshields that are separate from the weapon are in use by the IDF and other military/police units. The paradigm change of giving the individual Soldier a portable gunshield on his weapon would give him the ability to defeat bullets/shrapnel away from his body and face, the latter having no protection at all. A rifleman's gunshield would enable him in a firefight to gain LOS to fire his weapon on the enemy and gain fire superiority even if the enemy has "the drop" and has fired first at him abusing the "peace" illusion created by surrounding civilians.
