The idea behind the cage armor goes back at least to his days in Vietnam, said John Funk, the General Dynamics logistics support manager. Troops in that war improvised with chicken wire and other means to counter the RPG threat.
It’s too bad that there are no (or very few) Viet Nam Vets in Iraq. The people over there made a lot of improvements on the cheap – and the improvements worked. This new armor will weigh 5,200 pounds! I’d be willing to bet that if left to the troops, it would be a lot lighter, far less costly and work just as well.
This brings to mind the “new” gun trucks being made for Iraqi convoy escort duty. It’s sleek and high tech. It looks pretty, and there should be a couple ready in a few months. The old ugly gun trucks made by the troops in Nam worked great, were relatively cheap, took only a couple days to assemble and would work just as good in Iraq for convoy escort.
Mix in a couple of V-100's 150's, and you had a pretty secure package, as long as everybody else in the convoy understood their jobs.
That's what scares me. The loss of knowledge between wars is a hemmorage FYI.
The USMC ran FT17s in tinsien China in 1927 and a Col Serenno Brett ran a mixed platoon of light and heavy tanks in Panama for the army during the same period....And the info was lost. We need to trap that info and nail it down.
When I was researching for TANK ACES, I quickly found out that everything we had to learn in Vietnam about jungle tanking was learnt in Bataan and Guadalcanal in 42....And in Panama in 1926.
The problem is institutional memory. The ONLY source available to modern soldiers is personal memoirs. "Tank Sergeant" has been carried in tankers' pockets in Mogadishu, etc.
There has GOT to be a better way
Time marches on. The only people still on active duty are generals and a handful of crusty CWO's and National Guard and Reserve guys who have been called up. 1972 was 31 years ago. Nam vets are as rare now as WW II vets were when I came in.
The Stryker Brigade Combat Team Tactical Studies Group (Chairborne) is evolving into a forum where guys who have been there and done that can tell the rest of us about it. These posts are being read in the Pentagon, at General Dynamics, and overseas, and some of our best posters on these Stryker threads are presently inside the belly of the beast.
I wish all you early baby boomers would teach a friend of yours how to use a computer and recruit him as a Freeper and get him on the SBCTTSG (ChBN)Ping List. Good war stories are a terrible thing to waste.