The New Military: Proposing change

The Times Herald Norristown, PA ^ | 11/28/2003 | KEITH PHUCAS

[Cannoneer No. 4]

Part one of a three-part series on the United States evolving armed forces.

NORRISTOWN - Transformation is the guiding principle for today's U.S. military, and top Defense officials have mandated sweeping changes aimed to quicken the pace of warfare and streamline the Pentagon's cumbersome bureaucracy.

On Nov. 24, President Bush signed the $401 billion Defense Authorization Bill of 2004, the largest defense budget in history.

And though the military's fighting capability is second to none, officials warn that the time it takes to develop some weapons renders them obsolete by the time they are finally produced -often 15 to 20 years later.

Borrowing the best attributes of U.S. Special Operations Forces, the Defense Department envisions a faster, more agile, more lethal fighting force guided in battle by increasingly sophisticated digital technology.

What's Imperative for an Information Age fighting force, according to Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, Ret., director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, is being connected to the military's Tactical Internet and wowing the enemy.

"We want our enemies, current and future, to look at us and say, 'Wow, how do they do that?'" He told an audience at the Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington recently.

With a continuously improving fighting capability, defeated enemy forces will be left to scratch their heads wondering what hit them. They will see an attack unfold before their eyes, Cebrowski said, but they won't understand how it happened and will be powerless to stop it.

"That's the power of transformation," he said.

Network-centric warfare

Digital warfare came of age in Operation Iraqi Freedom in March. Functioning as the military's communications network, the Tactical Internet relayed command-and-control decisions from commanders to soldiers and Marines crammed inside armored vehicles rolling through the Iraqi desert.

The Force XXI Battle Command Brigade and Below (FBCB2) is the U.S. Army's main digital command-and-control system for highly mobile, real-time battle information.

Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M1A1 Abrams tanks equipped with FBCB2 gave the infantry a picture of the battlefield that included color-coded displays of friendly forces (blue icons) and enemy troop (red icons) locations. During the war, the system effectively replaced paper maps and radio voice communication.

The military's high-tech advantage needs to constantly change and improve, Cebrowski said, to keep enemies second guessing U.S. strategy. The Iraqi military, he said, likely studied the 1991 Gulf War strategy to gauge what coalition forces would do during the recent war.

"That's exactly what we want to happen," he said. "I like to see a lot of generals who want to fight the last war, (but) I just want them all to be on the other side." Not knowing precisely where geographically future threats will come from, defense officials say it's imperative to train troops jointly for rapid deployment to almost anywhere on earth.

The Transformation director and other Pentagon reformers are especially critical of the time it takes to produce weapons systems. Defense programs development cycles must be brought in line with those of commercial industry, Cebrowski said, which are typically measured in months and years - not decades.

Trimming weight

The U.S. Army's Crusader artillery program was an early casualty of the transformation initiative. The $11 billion program was cancelled last year. According to Cebrowski, any weapons program is expendable if it doesn't meet the new transformation criteria.

"(Crusader) is a legacy of industrial age warfare born to satisfy the Army's indirect fire requirements in a strategic context that no longer exists," he said. In other words, Crusader is a relic of the Cold War: too heavy, too expensive and too long in development.

The main Crusader tracked vehicle, equipped with a 150 mm howitzer [I think they mean 155mm - Cannoneer], requires a companion vehicle to supply it with ammunition. The two vehicles weigh in at a whopping 81 tons - a lot of hardware to haul to a battle front.

The lightweight Stryker infantry vehicle is one of transformation's new kids on the block exemplifying a light, more mobile capability. The Stryker family of vehicles, 10 in all, includes a version equipped with 105 mm gun, and models that carry infantry, ammunition and wounded troops.

The "trim" 19-ton vehicle comes loaded with digital technology and has a top speed of 62 miles per hour - 21 miles per hour faster than the much heavier 35-ton Abrams tank. Because of its lighter weight, the Stryker would be easier to transport to faraway fronts, another top transformation goal.

In February, the army began testing the mobile gun Stryker at Aberdeen Proving Ground, near Baltimore, Md. The vehicle is expected to debut in Iraq early next year.[emphasis Cannoneer's]

While Cebrowski doesn't want to eliminate tanks altogether, he clearly believes Stryker is the centerpiece of the military's future, giving the forces necessary nimbleness and speed in urban areas such as Baghdad.

Though the tanks proved effective in protecting their crews from artillery or missile fire, for the transformation director, the new high-tech vehicles give troops better awareness of where the enemy is located so that troops can avoid danger - or speed out of harm's way.

"Anyone that doesn't like speed, or says that speed isn't required, has never been shot at," he said.

However, the Stryker has its share of critics. A report prepared for New Jersey Republican Rep. James Saxton, a member of the House Armed Service Committee, concluded the vehicle is ill suited for warfare.

The July report, written by consultant Victory O'Reilly, said that the vehicle was poorly armored and vulnerable to rocket-propelled grenade attacks.

Responding to the report's finding, the army said that Strykers headed for combat have recently been reinforced with additional armor.

But even armor has limits. In some situations armor is necessary; in other cases it isn't, Cebrowski said.

"(Steel) didn't help 17 dead sailors on board (U.S.S.) Cole, for example," he said. "This is a steel ship. And so you don't see the Navy talking about adding more steel to its destroyers (ships)."

The U.S.S. Cole was attacked in Yemen by terrorists in a bomb-laden boat in 2000. The explosion created a huge hole in the ship.

Instead of more steel, the director said, timely reconnaissance is crucial for safeguarding fighting units. Unmanned aerial vehicles were used effectively in Afghanistan and Iraq to spot enemy troops from the air.

Once the enemy was located on the ground, air power was called in to bomb their positions. This close relationship between the infantry and air support was one of the pluses to come out of Iraq's post-war analysis. The air-infantry teamwork also raises questions about the necessity of Crusader or other artillery programs.

"It is as if we will have discovered a new sweet spot in the relationship between land warfare and air warfare and a tighter integration of those," he said.

A newly formed Stryker Brigade Combat Team - a 2nd Infantry Division unit from Fort Lewis in Washington state - is currently in Kuwait. When the unit moves into Iraq next year [Next year?], defense officials will be watching closely to see how Stryker performs.

The 5,000-strong Stryker brigade is part of a planned troop rotation next year.

Overall, the Pentagon plan to replace 130,000 American troops in Iraq with a fresh contingent that will shrink the force by 20 percent, according to The Associated Press.

The National Guard and Reserve troops make up about 20 percent of the current force of 130,000. According to AP, after the rotation ends in April, nearly 40 percent of the 105,000 troops in the new force will be National Guard and Reserve forces.

Tomorrow: The New Military, Part 2: "The Long Hitch"

Keith Phucas can be reached at kphucas@timesherald.com or at 610-272-2500, ext. 211.

[tortoise]

Your argument is silly. Wrt mobility, trax beats out wheels EVERY TIME. The denied terrain to tanks is a whole lot less than that of wheels.

Show where I ever said that we should replace tracks with wheels. HINT: I didn't. My only argument has been that there is a good reason to lighten the armor of future combat vehicles (tracked or otherwise) because rapidly increasing lethality of anti-armor weapons is making heavy armor about as effective as light armor against such systems without a practical technological solution. Therefore, one can argue that we should replace some of the armor weight with more speed/mobility and more deadly weapon systems.

[Cannoneer No. 4]

I'm beginning to have serious doubts that you understand the history of armor and anti-armor. We have not reached the end of history, and we have not yet reached the end of technological means of defeating kinetic projectiles. There was a time when 37mm solid shot defeated all known armored vehicles. The penetrators get faster and harder and denser, the armor gets thicker, or harder, and the measure/counter-measure cycle continues.

You can do all the math you want. I am not an engineer, I'm a historian. New technologies will eventually arise that provide protection against kinetic energy penetrators. It started with shield versus arrow. It hasn't ended yet.

And I don't grok much, but I do recognize pedantry when I see it. It's in the dictionary next to pederastry.

[Darksheare]

I'm willing to bet that Israel will basically strip it down to it's body and replace the suspension and anything else that isn't nailed down, and some stuff that is.
*chuckle*
Heck, they've made some interesting improvement to some vehicles that made them much better than the original design..
Yes, they will be ditching the mobile bedframe look.
That's guaranteed.

Gun Stryker one on one with a BTR80/90.. BTR80/90 wins.
Just from the Stryker being top heavy, and about as mobile as a greyhound bus.

[archy]

LOSAT.
That's ours.
Russia is way behind in that arena.
Unless we get stupid and sell it to people.

But they have a system that's WAY too close to Ground-launched Hellfire/ Brimstone for me to be comfortable.

10KM range, 95% hit probability, with a reported ability of defeating 800mm of armor. Scary.

[sauropod]

Your original argument was to go w/ Stryker. I just gave you another reason not to.

[sauropod]

" My only argument has been that there is a good reason to lighten the armor of future combat vehicles (tracked or otherwise) because rapidly increasing lethality of anti-armor weapons is making heavy armor about as effective as light armor against such systems without a practical technological solution. Therefore, one can argue that we should replace some of the armor weight with more speed/mobility and more deadly weapon systems.

I am not an armor design weenie, but there are folks at work that i can ask about this. Your argument sounds too much like something Dave Hackworth might say.

[Darksheare]

That has me worried.
They hit the 10k range mark before us.

[tpaine]

Cannoneer No. 4
"Network-centric warfare"

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Nobody knows what this is. This is so much OSD cerebral onanism.
15 -sp-

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Some things never change.. Just before I got out in 1958, the Army brass were touting a new vision of "Pentomic Divisions".

[Darksheare]

???
Pentomic Divisions?
That wouldn't happen to use nukes now, would it?
The Davy Crockett 'nuclear grenade'?

[tortoise]

Ever hear of reactive armor?

If you were actually following this thread carefully, you would note that I already covered this. First, reactive armor has quite a few limitations in general and it is generally only useful against anti-armor systems that are susceptible to diffusion methods (e.g. shaped-charge weapons). Diffusion methods have very marginal usefulness against hyper-velocity uranium penetrators for a number of technical reasons that I could go into, and reactive armor in particular has almost no efficacy.

Cheap solutions like reactive armor are why KE weapons are preferred by the military where feasible, because they are much more difficult and expensive to defend against. For man portable systems though, HE shaped charge type weapons are the only practical choice.

[tortoise]

You can do all the math you want. I am not an engineer, I'm a historian. New technologies will eventually arise that provide protection against kinetic energy penetrators. It started with shield versus arrow. It hasn't ended yet.

By your reasoning, because cars get faster with time, we should have a Chevy that breaks the speed of light sooner than later. Physics be damned.

[tortoise]

Your argument sounds too much like something Dave Hackworth might say.

Ewww... That would be a weird day.

[tpaine]

Some things never change.. Just before I got out in 1958, the Army brass were touting a new vision of "Pentomic Divisions".
108 tpaine

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???
Pentomic Divisions?
That wouldn't happen to use nukes now, would it?
The Davy Crockett 'nuclear grenade'?
109

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Beats me what 'Pentomic' really meant.
I was in the 503rd of the 11th, and they reorganised us as the 502nd.

[300winmag]

Artillery can operate in all weather, reardless of crosswinds and foul weather.

And is available 24/7, unlike the USAF, which likes 24 hours advance notice.

The problem is really rooted in the desire that every piece of Army gear must fit in a C130. The Army is forbidden to own fixed-wing transports or attack aircraft, so it has to depend on the Air Force. The Air Force ranks Army needs just below ash and trash, and not a career-enhancer. Just look at how the USAF tries to sluff off their own A10 drivers. The Marines have their own airlift and attack aircraft, or can at least force the Navy to do it for them.

With the unspoken main assumption that it must fit in a C130, all sorts of miraculous capabilites have to be pulled out of a hat. Netcentrism substitutes for firepower, and wheeled speed for armor. And somehow the need for indirect fire support goes away.

There may be some neat stuff inside Stryker once it's debugged, but that process always takes 10-20 years, and could be deployed in other systems, too. Meanwhile, in a world where the RPG is the weapon of first and last resort for the bad guys, an eight-wheel cheesebox does not give me the warm and fuzzies, especially if someone is saying the cheesebox doesn't need air and arty support any more.

[archy]

That has me worried.

They hit the 10k range mark before us.

Laser directed- it's a SACLOS unit. And their laser director doubles as a rangefinder and director for their aircraft delivered bombs and missiles, too. Keep the WP rounds out, particularly the stuff with the Ti flakes in it.

More worrisome: theirs is fielded, and Kornet and Khrizantema are nearly so, awaiting only the command decisions as to what the most efficient mix and employment will be. Even BTR 80/90 have a two-tube autoreloading launcher, and the Kliver turret with twin or quad Kornets and 30mm autocannon can be retrofitted to old tracked BTR50, MTLVs and T55, or wheeled BTR 60/70, much less early BMD and BMP-1 and -2 vehicles.

Every, vehicle, EVERY ONE, a potential tank killer, and armed with a 23 or 30mm autocannon besides. And if one AT system proves to be a flop, there are two or three others waiting to do the job better.

Kliver missile and gun turret mounted on the Russian Army's BTR-80 armoured personnel carrier.

[Cannoneer No. 4]

By your reasoning, because cars get faster with time, we should have a Chevy that breaks the speed of light sooner than later. Physics be damned.

You're not a NASCAR fan, are you?

How much faster do you think the cars of today are than the cars of 40 years ago?

The same physics that makes you so all fire certain that no counter-measure will ever be found to the high velocity penetrator will provide that counter-measure. Just because you lack the imagination to envision it does not make it impossible.

[Darksheare]

Ugh. Reorg'd!

[Darksheare]

Yeah, got to see an A10 that was comically marked 'US Army'.
I'm assuming that particular pilot's days in teh jumpseat are over.
The need for indirect fire will never go away, no matter how many times some idiot decides it's mission is over.

The only reason a C-130 was chosen to be the measure of choice is that there's so many of them.
A 141 would have been a better choice, but...

[Darksheare]

Why does that bottom one look like the SA-13 Gopher??

[Cannoneer No. 4]

Everything old is new again. Our new CSA wants 5 brigades in a division, now, instead of 3. The old Pentomic Division had 5 Battle Groups.

In the late 1950s, the Army reorganized each infantry division into a "pentomic division" with five battle groups in preparation for tactical nuclear war in Europe. These groups were, in effect, large battalions. Each battle group had five rifle companies, a combat support company, and appropriate field artillery and service support. The battle groups were self-sustaining, could be employed singly or in combinations, and remained largely unchanged during the 1950s.