We don't need to make heavier armor. We have gobs of the stuff sitting around in warehouses stateside. We even have quite a bit prepositioned near the theater (Kuwait, Diego e.g.). A year into the war, the idea that we are restricted by 72 hour deployability in C-130 specs is getting a bit ripe.
I consider the worry expressed by the thread in some respects legitimate - it is indeed crazy to expect zero casualties - but in the end it is a straw man argument. One side constructs the worst possible argument for a proposition that it can find, and finds a few people advancing it for ulterior motives. That side then argues against that weakest argument instead of against the best one. This decides nothing.
What is really going on here in a wider sense is that methods of propaganda and ideological politics have infected force planning. This is at least a dozen years old, and by now it is a serious problem within the military.
Arguments have been advanced against the heavy army for that long, and are still being advanced, that are based on shallow thinking and slogans and pet theories about the future of warfare. Significant investments have been made in these slogans. Budget fights among services, large future projects, institutional power of various sets, and military careers have all flocked around the proposition, "the heavy army is a cold war dinosaur fit only to fight the Warsaw Pact on the north German plain".
And it simply isn't so.
The old army was then admonished to become "expeditionary", to become deployable at a moment's notice, to get light and flexible and fast, to shorten its logistical tail, etc. And along with all this came force changes that are largely atmospheric in their relation to these largely imaginary objectives. Wheels not tracks. Hummers not Brads. Deployability by air rather than by ship.
In the first few moments of a conflict, these abilities are assets for a portion of the force. It makes sense to have light airborne units and Marines that are this deployable - though the Marines have known for a long time you also need to back that up with some heavy stuff, to keep combined arms effects. But the basic picture of what the army would do that was involved was not correct. And the basic attitude toward heavy armor and its uses was also not correct.
As a fact, we fight major wars with 6 months or more of diplomatic preparation, not 72 hours. We fight in the same places not for days but for years. The threat uses RPGs and mines and mortars; we are lucky they don't have better.
And the reality is heavy armor is decidedly useful against these enemies. The 3rd ID went to Baghdad in record time because of it. We were told urban fighting would be an infantry leading knife fight, but they took Baghdad in days at trivial cost, while slaughtering large numbers of light irregulars doing so.
After the peak combat phase it remains useful. Pinpoint direct HE is useful, mobile MG firepower is useful, protection from snipers and nearby IEDs is extremely useful, and protection in addition from RPGs, while gravy, is a good thing to have available in many situations.
All of this could have been predicted and in fact was. The Israelis know it, for example. But those saying so were not listened to, because they seemed to stand in the way of the whole light deployable etc plan. Which every other branch of service had already invested in, ideologically or in sloganeering terms.
Rumsfeld bought into this because he was told it was so by practically everybody. Even the leaders of the army during the Clinton era transitioned to those willing to go along with this slogan driven campaign, to accomodate the pressures being put on the heavy army to get rid of its internal institutional knowledge and instead follow the new slogan driven directives. Light forces within the army rode this internal-external power field to careerist dominance. Rummy is a national treasure, but on this subject he has naturally followed the bulk of the expert advice he received.
It is just a mistake. A honest one, a typical peacetime one. Planners think AB and C will be the critical matters in the next war, it comes along and in reality it is C, L and Z. Simple mistakes just get noticed and corrected. Institutions are healthy when they can do this, when ideological creeds do not destroy ability to recognize such things and adapt to them.
What we are seeing with the Hummer story is resistence to learning and adapting, being overridden by reality, from the bottom up. Soldiers that did not have much protection simply went and got it. We had Spec 4s prowling Iraqi junkyards for sheet metal, and PFCs filling sand bags to line the floors of their trucks. We have junior officers signing 6 figure contracts with Iraqi metal dealers to weld extra plate onto their vehicles. And we have units fighting each other to get hold of uparmored rather than plain Hummers, fighting over whether they rotate stateside with their units or stay, etc.
Anybody who likes can pretend to decry the process. But it is a straw man to pretend it is driven by pols here, or by veiled defeatism, or anything of the sort. Our men in the field are doing it. Their higher ups are being dragged along. And the result is certainly not optimal. Uparmored Hummers aren't that much better protected and they strain the suspension etc. Meanwhile, tons of heavy armor we've had all the time in the world to deploy, that our men are trained to use, has already been paid for long since and is sitting around being inventoried.
It is not being used because using it would validate a future role for it that the sloganeers are still resisting. But this is a poor reason. Ideas about the likely future ways we will fight are meant to help us adapt our fighting methods. If instead they prevent our doing so, they are not entirely helpful. If the whole process occurred in a basically professional and technocratic atmosphere, through chains of command, this would be relatively easy to recognize and act upon.
Such institutional knowledge is resisted as hidebound and unwilling to change. Slogans and the shallow thinking they bring are one way of promoting change and overriding objections. Sometimes that may be necessary. But it has a downside, which is inability to recognize when the old conventional wisdom is simply right, and revolutionaries have thrown a baby out with some bathwater.
Heavy armor is such a baby. We should stop squabbling about it, accept the fact, and go get him.
"Rummy is a national treasure, but on this subject he has naturally followed the bulk of the expert advice he received. ... And we have units fighting each other to get hold of uparmored rather than plain Hummers..."
Rumsfeld is doing fine. Our war victory was fine, and our occupation is fine.
And HMMVW's, by the way, are just Jeeps. They aren't meant for armored patrols. They are soft vehicles designed to use a *minimum* of fuel at a minimum cost to transport small groups of troops and tiny amounts of supplies to typical miscellaneous rear echelon locations.
The problems, however, are perception and ignorance. People who are demanding uparmored HMMVW's are trying to forcefit a square peg into a round hole. Armored patrols are supposed to be performed by Bradleys, M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, or even weakling little Strykers...NOT performed by soft vehicles like Jeeps (ooops, Hummers).
Likewise, the people who think that our war victory was wrong have problems understanding Hussein's financing of destabilization efforts (e.g. paying off the families of suicide bombers in Israel/Palestine, manipulating Kurds against Turks and Iranians, joint cooperation with Al Qaeda and Ansar Al-Islam, etc.), his violations of his 1991 surrender treaty (e.g. failure to demonstrate that he dismantled his 1991-declared WMD's, firing at U.S. fighters patroling the UN "no fly zones", etc.), and that having a U.S. army on both sides of Iran (e.g. in Afghanistan and Iraq) was important.
The people who think that our occupation is going badly because 130 Americans were killed in our worst month there are the same people who glibly ignore 3,000 people killed on 9/11/2001, ignore the over 3,000 Americans killed each *month* on our own highways, and don't even know that Hitler's Nazi "werewolves" started bombing Americans in 1946, a full *year* after we conquered and occupied Germany after WW2. In Iraq we have 24 to 25 million people, most of whom are peacefully going about their daily lives. Roughly 4,000 fighters oppose us in that country, a statistical flyspeck on a graph versus 24 million people, yet there are opportunistic people here who would gleefully declare Iraq to be an "unwinnable" disaster that we should promptly flee from.
And people who want to forcefit HMMVW's into the armored patrol roles of Bradley's and M1A1's likewise seem to miss the realities of this conflict.
Use the right tool for the right job. Don't weigh down your light, efficient, soft vehicles...and don't try to use soft vehicles for armored patrols.
Nor does every piece of "heavy" armor have to be able to shrug off 120mm artillery blasts. Frankly, light bars extended a yard from the core of most medium-armored vehicles will provide the screening protection needed for armored patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan because the key weapon to defend against is the RPG...which shoots a stream of molten metal but has a comparitively weak overall blast.
And as for Rumsfeld, he has killed the useless boondoggles (e.g. Crusader long range dumb artillery) that provide *nothing* in the way of helping us improve our armored patrols down RPG alleys. Rumsfeld is shaping our military into an even more incredible power, a power for the future...a power that can also handle the brute force attacks of more primitive populations, too.