When did armored vehicles become an entitlement program?
When did armored vehicles become an entitlement program?
I hardly know where to start or stop on this subject. One part of me feels for the soldiers, and the other side wants to say, enough is enough of the belly aching. I hate to tell war stories, Oliver North does a fine job of that every Sunday night, but having "been there and done that" and have a Tee Shirt somewhere, I want to toss in my two cents worth from 34 years ago in South Vietnam.
I was in field artillery as a mechanic. I spent the majority of my one year in firing batteries spread throughout the third military region, especially the area from Cambodia to Tay Ninh and a little North to Song Bee, Anh Loc and South toward Saigon. We fired hundreds of 155mm rounds daily and had to have some method of getting resupplied. That task was the battery headquarters, Service Battery was tasked with running the ASP (Ammo Supply Point) but we had to get the ammo and other supplies from the base camps to the fire bases. How did we do it? Convoys of 5t drop side cargo trucks. Support for the convoy was usually a couple of gun jeeps (Cannoneer No. 4 - that pic sure looks familiar) and one or two "quads" mounted in 5 tons. That was it.
Armor protection for the drivers consisted of sand bags on the floor and a scrounged flak vest draped over the door to protect us from snipers. Was I comfortable? Heck no, but we had a mission, we had the equipment and we did the job with no complaints, other than when the beer we were supposed to get was not there or some other hiccup.
There was an incident I was involved in 2 days before Christmas where an ambush killed two soldiers, probably needlessly, but there was no outcry for more armor. They were in an M38B1 (3/4 ton truck) and the ambush was done with .51 caliber machine guns. Would they have survived in more heavily armored trucks? Maybe. However we didn't have them. We broke up the ambush and killed the bad guys. We mourned the loss of two fellow soldiers, and like most of the military today, we continued with the mission.
I wonder why we are starting to see a military in which each soldier is starting to develop a mindset they are "owed" a personal set of armor. It would be great to do so, but each battle in each war is different and would require slightly different equipment, tactics, techniques and procedures. If we were to conduct war in that manner we might still be waiting in the English Channel off of Normandy.
This is sort of rambling, but I have not had enough coffee today.
BINGO. Aside from the fact that the liberal media has a fresh point of impact to pile on the Bush administration with, what bothers me most about this issue is the sense that every military vehicle in theater must somehow be able to withstand the effects of an IED or an RPG hit. It's a fantasy notion, since IEDs can and have easily bounced M2A3s around and RPGs will penetrate any flat panel armor suitable to be attached to a HMMV or cargo vehicle. This feeds into a fortress mentality (can you say basecamp?) where the name of the game is to "survive" the war vice win it.
The media loves this, of course, because it feeds into their Vietnam prototype for reporting failure and quagmire. When your hunkered down in your HMMV/5 ton/HMMT etc...your not (effectively) fighting a threat that's more mobile than you. When your not fighting, you're not contributing and you become a target marker. Do I want our soldiers and Marines protected? Sure, to the extent that they can still function in attacking and killing terrorists, but not at the expense of losing the initiative.