The New Military: Proposing change

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The army has two missions that are entirely different from each other. The mission involving the war on terror has the requirements of a large force of ground troops which we no longer have. With the backdrop of N Korea, China , etc. which could be our next opponents, the requirements for heavy armor, high-tech weapons and massive killing power is required.

Trying to prepare for both contingencies has the only common denominator of additional ground troops and light infantry. This is where we have been weakened at the expense of new high-tech developement. When we can't control the ground in Iraq, how are we going to do with a major enemy force? The advantage of the Stryker being able to outrun the enemy is probably the least reason to buy the system.

The Stryker can' outrun diddly.
That's the point.
It is unstable on even flat ground, so they stick 'requirements and restrictions' on speed of turns and operating 'parameters' that are unrealistic in actual combat.
Despite Shinseki's quaalude induced hallucination, wheels are NOT more manueverable than tracked vehicles.
A tank can turn within it's own body length.
In urban combat, that is a plus.
The Stryker has the turn radius of a greyhound buss.
A tank can run over sharp objects, Stryker cannot.
A tank can cross rolling terrain at speed.
Stryker would be lucky to not roll over like a dog on flat ground let alone rolling terrain.

The Stryker MGS cannot fire in a full arc around itself, and required reduced poweder rounds to prevent flipping when fired broadside.
And it STILL flips when fried broadside producing them to make a requirement to not fire broadside.
NOT realistic in combat.
The Stryker will be a liability in North Korea rather than an asset.
It is designed specifically for paved improved roads like those here in the US.
That is where it operates the best.
I do not know of any country we might operate in where the roads will stay in pristine form during combat, let alone having a network of roads like what we have here.

Archy, anything to add that I might have missed?

There's always a back and forth between armor development and defeating it....I remember when the sabot round supposedly meant the the end of the tank!

This is a fallacious argument though. It is like saying a horse will always be faster than a car because one can always breed a faster horse. Eventually, it just doesn't work any more. System limits.

Military engineering is limited almost entirely by the limits of materials science. We have come to the point where one can design anti-armor weapons such that no physical material has the strength to prevent penetration and that it takes meters of the best composite materials known to science available for any price to dissipate the energy.

The military R&D effort in the '90s has spent much effort on the engineering of various anti-armor systems that are capable of breaching the fundamental physical limits of armor, and these efforts are bearing a lot of fruit. The US will be deploying new anti-armor weapons shortly that, in the words of the military, "can defeat all existing and future projected armor systems". How do they know this for uninvented "future" armor systems? Because short of discovering new laws of physics and Star Trek technology, there is no known material in existence that is capable of withstanding these weapons. They breach the physical limits of normal molecular materials.

What the US can do now technologically will start showing up in the hands of our enemies in a decade or two. The permanent obsolesence of armor is no more than a decade or two off and the US military knows it, unless we develop a new exotic type of armor/shielding that is not dependent on molecular bonds. As a consequence, future systems are being designed without provisions for protecting against anti-armor weapon systems that can't be practically defeated anyway.

Like creating a small friendly occupied hole from within which to create a pocket of friendlies to push out from.. within the enemy rear area.

Sounds too much like the base aero terrestre the Froggies had at Dien Bien Phu

We have tried fire bases.

Instead of stirring up a hornet's nest by plopping a firebase down in enemy country and then playing Davy Crockett at the Alamo, why not try rolling pockets of mobile combined arms, to include SP artillery, surpisingly similar to old-style Armored Cavalry Regiments, to run amok in the enemy's rear, assuming we ever again fight an enemy who has a rear.

The Stryker is NOT the answer.
It cannot protect from even minor MG fire.
It cannot manuever worth beans.
The turning radius is that of a greyhound bus.
An Abrams can out turn that thing.

Armor development will ALWAYS progress.
Your argument is that the tank is finished, and you are wrong for the same reason that the argument that artillery is finished is wrong.
But, I doubt you'll get it.
I've heard too many Shinseki apologists and Strykerphilic zombies saying the same thing.
And they are wrong to the point that it will kill people.
That is irresponsible and reprehensible.
Having less armor and wheels doesn't make a soldier anymore elite than wearing a beret makes him a better soldier and improves morale.
If we're going to field soldiers, we better darn well give him the best equipment we can produce, not a horse designed by a commitee to do the work of a jackdaw.
"If you send a soldier to battle with nothing but a pile of rocks, you owe him every rock in the pile"
Have a nice day.

Canada having limited funds chose 6 and 8 wheeled LAV's tied to the many U.N./NATO operations has been a positive move as contribution and operation performance goes.

Canada will spend $500 million on 60 Strykers to complement her LAV III's.
Canadian Coyote

For Canada the plus is the 105 mm tube on Stryker..which see's ordinance match the New Leopard C2 MBT.

Some question the *punch of the 105mm....Israel played around with their 105 munitions in the 70's which was standard to the Centurions,M-48's and M-60's.
The Israeli 105mm round was able to wollop like a 120mm and had outstanding distance range coupled to their then fire control systems.
Israel stayed with the 105 in their first and second gen Merkava MBT's.
The 105mm is still a powerfull weapon..coupled with over the Horizon targeting as discussed in this thread.

Leopard C2 Armor upgrade

And reducing armor to nothing, as in the Stryker, is moronic and bordering on dereliction of duty.

I wasn't commenting on the Stryker, only on the fact that the next generation of anti-armor weapons breach the physical limits of molecular materials and therefore can't be shielded against for any practical purpose. Armor development is over for now.

That said, I will generally agree that the Stryker is a suboptimal platform. Heavy armor is no substitute for the Stryker, but there are a lot of things about it that could have been better designed. The issue of heavy armor and the design of the Stryker are independent issues that are being improperly conflated.

Yeah.
Rumor had it that a GPS guided round was being developed for artillery.
I'm assuming it would be able to be modified for tanks as well.

The 105mm may have less boom, but there, again, have been rumors of 'stretching' the shell somewhat to have something akin to a double shaped charge warhead inside it.
*chuckle*
And those rumors are three years out of date.
Wonder what is being developed now?
thanks.

Armor development will ALWAYS progress.

Pray tell, how do you build armor that can withstand anti-armor weapons that breach the physical limits of molecular materials? That can breach several meters of the strongest molecular materials known to science? Armor development is over until we can make shielding that doesn't rely on normal molecular materials. That doesn't mean we should abandon armor where it makes sense, but the days of heavy armor are over.

The idea that we can always build better impervious armor is wishful thinking; we are up against the basic laws of physics. We've reached the limits of what can be done with conventional physical engineering. We should still use armor to protect against incidental crap flying around (like bullets), but trying to stop dedicated anti-armor weapons is a futile exercise. As a country on the forefront of military technological development, we are well aware of this fact since we were the first country to develop anti-armor systems capable of this.

Heavy armor is very quickly being eliminated as a useful tool.

How many times have we heard that?

Tank versus anti-tank, measure versus counter-measure versus counter-counter-measure; sometimes the tank is up, sometimes not, but we have been hearing this since the Germans invented a 13mm Mauser elephant gun as the first anti-tank weapon.

How would you have taken Baghdad without heavy armor?

If indeed heavy armor is of no use, why do the Israelis keep any tanks?

All they had to do with Stryker to make it a better platform was leave it as it's original design was.
It had tracks instead of wheels.
*snort*
Shinseki insisted it had to have wheels.

Silicon Nitride is used to produce ball bearings and small sheets that are unbreakable.
An unbreakable ceramic.
Development of any armor based off it, or anything similar, was killed back in the 80's.

The next generation of anti-armor weapons are still a generation or so away, the Russians are selling tube fired anti-tank missiles that can disable the M1A1 Abrams right now.

Congress played around with the military on several fronts, most being transportation of all kinds, and then killed most programs.
They killed any development of anything that could carry the Crusader, and then cited that there wasn't anything that could carry it as a reason for killing the program.

The Stryker was pawned off (as a selling point) as a one on one tank replacement.
And the article skirts that without saying it outright like they did last year.
The Stryker cannot hope to go toe to toe with tanks and win.
Ever.
Regardless of how many Burger King broiler grills they stick on it.
It's insane that there are those that think this vehicle is a good idea and can do tasks beyond it's capabilities.

The worst part of getting stuck like that was this, not a single Abrams, Bradley, OR Paladin driver offered to pull us out.

Want some cheese with that whine?

How many treadheads with thrown tracks did you ever stop and offer to help?

Standard price for vehicle recovery has traditionally been cases of beer. What brand were you offering?

A plasma jet requires that it be in contact with a solid. If there's a vented void inside the armor, there's no solid to contact. The plasma jet loses strength.

Umm, this is not really how state-of-the-art anti-armor systems work. They function in a way that would require molecular materials with extreme properties that can't exist within physics as we know it in order to be defeated, and a void just means less armor they have to go through. Which was the whole point of the US R&D effort in this regard. They invented a class of anti-armor weapons for which there is no engineering solution (other than not getting hit) because an engineering solution would require materials which cannot exist. It is like trying to engineer a stick of butter such that a red-hot steel spike won't go through it.

Our mainline anti-armor systems now have a design requirement of being indefeatable by heavy armor technologies. We can't have this both ways; we can't have anti-armor systems that no physical armor technology can withstand AND design armor systems that are capable of withstanding such weapons. It is a contradiction.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.