Posted on 10/28/2003 4:22:57 PM PST by Cannoneer No. 4
OTTAWA (CP) - Canada is buying 60 new combat vehicles to provide the battlefield gunfire once delivered by tanks, even though the army concluded five years ago that the armoured Stryker was a bad choice.
Defence Minister John McCallum will announce the multi-million-dollar purchase Wednesday, sources said. The Stryker is an eight-wheeled, 18-tonne, lightly armoured vehicle equipped with a 105-mm cannon. The United States is buying 2,100 of them in various variants, from GM Defence is London, Ont., and General Dynamics Land Systems in Michigan.
The Americans named the vehicle after two of their Medal of Honour winners. It's not clear what the Canadian army will call it.
In 2000, the army essentially declared their Leopard I tanks to be obsolete, suggesting the day of the tank was over, for Canada, at least. The tank was to be replaced by a "modern. mobile, armoured, direct-fire support vehicle."
Hence the Stryker.
But a 1998 study by the Directorate of Operational Research used computer games to put an armoured combat vehicle like the Stryker through battle simulations. It was a disaster and the authors said it would be "morally and ethically" wrong to substitute it for a tank.
"The ACV (armoured combat vehicle) was unable to manoeuvre in the face of the enemy," the study said. "When it did so, it was destroyed."
The study recommended flatly that the vehicle not be used to replace tanks.
McCallum has promised to save money by getting rid of "Cold War relics," which most analysts take to mean tanks. He's said to be enthusiastic about the Stryker, said David Rudd of the Institute for Strategic Studies.
"Does the minister know that the vehicle's a turkey?" Rudd asked.
He said a study done for an American congressman found the Stryker had many problems. The recoil of the gun was too much for the chassis and it was underarmoured, among other things.
Rudd said the Canadian army hasn't thought things through.
"The thing is too heavily armed for peace support operations, but the army has put it through the computer simulations and found this thing will get killed in the first five minutes of any real combat."
"Is this the vehicle on which we in Canada are going to put our faith?"
While the American army plans to use the Stryker in mobile brigades, it's still keeping a lot of 70-tonne main battle tanks around. Those tanks formed the hard spearhead of the American advance in Iraq.
The Canadian study found that units equipped with the armoured combat vehicle took up to three times as many casualties as tank-equipped units in their simulations.
Tank-equipped units could fight on after the initial clashes. Those with the ACV were essentially fought out after one skirmish.
The study also warned about the effects on the soldiers:
"To intentionally use them in place of (tanks), knowing the ACV's shortcomings, would undeniably raise morale and motivation problems in the armoured unit, to say nothing of the ethics of such a decision."
MGS Conclusions: The MGS is too tall, too wide, too heavy, and too expensive; performs poorly, and needs special non-standard ammo. Among the worst decisions ever made by the Army, except for the whole Stryker family procurement.
"Protection and weight were problems for the Army's new Stryker armored personnel carrier. Fitting soldiers inside is the problem for Stryker's sister vehicle, the Mobile Gun System (MGS).
Initial installations of the Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) system in the Stryker MGS caused tight fits for its commander and gunner, Army program documents state. The FBCB2 is a 10-inch, touch screen terminal that uses radio and satellites to send and receive artillery, e-mail, intelligence and weather data on the battlefield.
The protruding FBCB2 display makes it "very difficult to reach" gun controls and operate the computer system, service documents say. They show a 5-foot-4-inch major and a 5-foot-8-inch three-star general cramped in the gunner and vehicle commander positions.
The Army and the Stryker MGS' manufacturer, General Dynamics Land Systems, are working together on these issues, a company official said.
The service and General Dynamics have two more years to get MGS right. The Army will use a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle equipped with an anti-tank missile system in lieu of Stryker MGS when the first Stryker Force deploys to Iraq next month.
The Army also is developing a cage to put on Stryker to give the vehicle and its 11-person crew protection against rocket- propelled grenades, an industry official said. Stryker is the service's new eight-wheeled, 19-ton vehicle designed to give troops more speed and communications in combat."
No, it is deployable by C-17s. We used lots of them in Afghanistan. They don't need paved runways.
I'm not at all certain of that. A Humvee is much easier to abandon, is no more or less unarmoured than the wheel wells of the Stryker, and has external fuel tanks that offer a particularly useful aiming point for gunners looking for an easy kill. The Humvee can be transported with such add-on RPG preventatives as rolled chainlink mesh or capped thinwall metal or plastic tubing filled with water to lessen the effect of an RPG warhead and still be air-transported in theater; Stryker's would have to have such fittings removed and reinstalled each time they're moved, limiting their usefulness.
But taking a Stryker to a tank fight is much worse than having a knife in a gunfight; there are employable tactics that can make the knife a useful tool in some such situations. Those inside the Stryker will me more akin to attending a gunfight from inside a cardboard box while the other participants are wearing body armour.
-archy-/-
vs
.
One could not help but notice the tank-like vehicle at the Association of the U.S. Army's 2003 Annual Meeting held earlier this month in Washington, D.C.
The updated M8 Armored Gun System (AGS) with a new 120mm cannon almost immediately greeted conference attendees as they stepped onto the AUSA exhibit floor. That was United Defense Inc.'s point, industry officials said.
UDI believes the 105mm Stryker Mobile Gun System, built by General Dynamics Corp., based in Falls Church, Va., will not be ready by 2005. By displaying the AGS at AUSA — a vehicle that was cancelled by the Army in the mid-1990s — the company was signaling to the Army it has a stable-firing, bunker-busting vehicle now ready, industry officials said.
The Stryker brigades are the Army's new rapid-reaction force. The six-brigade unit, equipped with the new, wheeled, 19-ton Stryker infantry carrier vehicle, will use the vehicle's 62-mile-per-hour top speed and the Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade-and- Below system's information processing to outmaneuver and outsmart heavier enemy forces.
We say let the duels between these platforms begin.
Too bad we don't have two years until the Stryker system is deployed...... I doubt a HMMWV with a TOW2B system will make up for all a cannon can do. I still have this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
What irks me is we HAVE systems already and could feld them while the MGS gets ready. The Canadian company that makes the lave has a LAV 90 (less boom, but still good against BMPs, BTRs, T-55s, and bunkers). We also have the...gasp... XM-8 AGS that was ready for procurment, but is tracked (I know, I just sinned by mentioning the "T" word). We even have the little Stingray light tank with its 105mm cannon that we export, plus many more, even buying a LAV 25 like the Marines have would be better than a HMMWV. We could even try and put a Bradley turret on it (TOW and light cannon).
The Pandur II 8x8 can be fitted with a two-person 105mm Low Profile Turret System supplied by General Dynamics Land Systems.
AV Technology, a General Dynamics company, was awarded a $ 51 million AGMS contract from the US Army Tacom back in March of 1999 for the manufacture of Pandur 6 x 6 vehicles at AV’s Missouri facility. The AGMS (Armored Ground Mobility System) contract team consists of General Dynamics Land Systems and Steyr-Daimler-Puch Spezialfahrzeug, along with AV Technology, which is currently also producing the Pandur for the Kuwait National Guard. Special Operations Command was supposed to get 50 of them. Haven't heard much about them.
Centauro
16 of these were tested at Aberdeen and Knox about 3 years ago. Wonder where they are now?
Textron Marine & Land Systems developed the Cadillac Gage LAV-600 6 x 6 armoured car/reconnaissance vehicle. The LAV-600 uses many components of the LAV-300 6 x 6 light armoured vehicle, which has been built for export to a number of countries and is fitted with the complete turret of the full-tracked Cadillac Gage Stingray light tank, which has been in service with Thailand for some years. The power-operated turret sits at the rear of the hull and has a stabilised BAE Systems RO Defence 105mm Low Recoil Force gun that fires standard NATO ammunition
Too bad the Vextra is French. Stryker tires are Michelins. Wonder if Chirac could cut off our tire supply? something tels me they are going to go through a lot of them.
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