Posted on 01/22/2005 10:22:48 AM PST by Former Military Chick
YUMA, Ariz., Jan. 19 - Under a hot desert sun this week near the Mexican border, Col. Robert Groller watched a transport truck with a prototype suspension system speed across an off-road course.
Colonel Groller, one of the Army officers who oversees Humvees and larger transport trucks, was in the middle of the Army's Yuma Proving Ground, a sprawling expanse of desert larger than Rhode Island. He got right to the point.
Turning to a group of civilians and officers, he asked them why this truck would be worth spending more money on. "I get bombarded by contractors all the time with good ideas," he said a few minutes later. "Is it worth the extra dollars?"
Stung by criticism that its Humvees and larger transport vehicles are out of step with fighting an insurgency in Iraq, and with soldiers still being killed and maimed by roadside bombs, the Army this week gathered 44 military contractors here to help remake its transport vehicles. The Army expects the gathering, the first of its kind, to be an annual review of automotive technologies.
With billions of dollars in contracts for the Humvee and larger transport vehicles expiring this decade, starting with the Humvee in 2007, a new crop of generals overseeing the Army's vehicle fleet has decided to throw out the book. After all, the more than 100,000 transport vehicles were designed to move behind front lines, not operate in battle zones with no boundaries.
The officers say they want the next Humvee-type vehicles and larger transport vehicles to be faster, more agile, more fuel-efficient and able to have armor taken on and off like a medieval knight before battle. They want the vehicles to carry more equipment and be much easier to service.
And they also want the Army to more nimbly retrofit its existing transport vehicles with new technology as it becomes available instead of lagging years behind the car industry.
"We did not expect that the Humvee would have to fight these kinds of fights," said Lt. Gen. Claude V. Christianson, the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics at the Pentagon, in an interview at Yuma.
"The way we thought we would use trucks five or six years ago is different than the way we are using them today, and it's different because the environment in which we're using trucks is different," he said. "Our Army as well as the rest of the military was designed to fight on a different battlefield."
With contractors showing more than 100 technologies, there was a lot to consider, including cost. One contractor, General Purpose Vehicles of Michigan, rebuilt a suspension system for one of the Army's five-ton transports, allowing it to travel much faster and smoother.
During the suspension test, Colonel Groller asked how much the improved truck would cost and whether it would be worth it. James LeBlanc, the company's founder, who has a long gray ponytail and is about half Colonel Groller's size, pointed toward the Army's current truck. It was lumbering behind his prototype with its driver bouncing like a yo-yo in his seat.
"Which truck would you rather be in if somebody's shooting an R.P.G. at you?" said Mr. LeBlanc, referring to a rocket-propelled grenade.
Given the nature of combat in Iraq, the Army and its contractors say they see armor as only the beginning of how Humvees and other transport vehicles can be made more "survivable" - and better able to get through combat situations that such vehicles were not designed for. Indeed, the Yuma event showcased almost everything but armoring systems, which the Army has reviewed at separate events.
A who's who of top Army officers overseeing Humvees and other transport vehicles were present. The contractors were mostly private companies, from family-run businesses like Mr. LeBlanc's General Purpose Vehicles to large companies like AM General, an Indiana company that makes the Humvee.
For the contractors, the money at stake is significant, and there is no guarantee that AM General, a unit of Renco, or other contractors will make the replacement vehicles.
"Why would we buy the same old thing?" asked Brig. Gen. William Lenaers, who was recently appointed head of the Army's Tank Automotive Command Center, the military's hub of automotive oversight in the Detroit suburbs. "We're looking to get something that is markedly better, not a little better, but markedly better."
One big presenter in Yuma, Stewart & Stevenson, a publicly traded Houston-based military contractor, makes thousands of armored transport vehicles that are larger than Humvees. Those vehicles account for nearly 40 percent of the company's revenue, or close to half a billion dollars annually. As for AM General, the Army said that in the last 12 months, it had spent $830 million on Humvees.
In Yuma, two teams of about 10 civilian Army employees, a variety of Army officers and an observer from the Marines assessed the technologies as a handful of generals peered over their shoulders. There were Humvees with supercharged air-conditioners, demonstrations of dashboards with night vision, special long-lasting engine coolant and batteries that could take gunshots and still outlast today's batteries.
Some demonstrations made clear that many military vehicles lacked technologies widely used in consumer cars and trucks, like antilock brakes, in part because redesigned models of military vehicles appear every few decades, not every few years. In one test, AM General showed how suspension technology available on a Hummer H1, the consumer version of the Humvee sold by General Motors, could help the vehicle work its way out of a ditch.
This appealed to Brig. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly, an officer who plays a central role in procurement of such vehicles from the Army's operations near Detroit. He said antirollover technologies like electronic stability control, which is standard in many new sport utility vehicles, would save lives in military rollover accidents as well.
"We're putting that technology in our trucks now so if you have to make a sudden swerve to avoid a dangerous situation, the vehicle will adjust to it and the soldiers will be safer," he said.
General Christianson said the Army had to better integrate such technologies in vehicles in the field.
"Fifteen, 20 years from now, most of the tactical wheeled vehicles we have today will still be in the Army," he said. "Even though I bought a truck in '75 when there wasn't any A.B.S.," he said, referring to antilock brake systems, "and maybe we didn't have any power steering on it, and maybe it didn't have an automatic transmission, there's no reason that if I rebuild that truck in 2005 I can't put on A.B.S., power steering."
Chris Chambers, an executive at Stewart & Stevenson, called armor a last line of defense when combined with technologies that mask a vehicle from detection and navigation systems that tell soldiers where they are and where they should not be.
"Most people today think protection is all about slapping armor on," he said. "It isn't."
And in Iraq, where driving fast is seen as one way to avoid or mitigate improvised explosive devices - the Army refers to them as I.E.D.'s - consumer safety technologies are increasingly of interest.
"Speed is your friend with I.E.D.'s," said General Lenaers, adding, "we're losing a lot of soldiers to accidents because they're riding at high speeds down the road to avoid" the devices.
Much of the criticism for the fleet's lack of readiness has been directed at the secretary of defense, Donald H. Rumsfeld, who was put to task for his response last month to a soldier's question about why he had to outfit his Humvee with improvised and ineffective "hillbilly" armor.
Army officers say they were also caught off guard when the Humvee and other transport vehicles became targets in the insurgency. At the beginning of the Iraq war, only a small number of armored Humvees were ordered and only for military police and scout patrols.
A year and a half ago, General Christianson said officers in the field thought there was only minimal need for armored Humvees - about 400 out of 30,000 Humvees in Iraq. Now, the Army has a goal of armoring two-thirds of the Humvees in Iraq within a few months. About 8,000 will be up-armored, or manufactured by AM General with upgraded suspensions ready to be armored by another company. Another roughly 12,000 Humvees will be equipped with add-on armor kits, which bolster protection but also add stress to suspension systems and decrease the vehicle's life span.
"It is fair to say that the requirements for our trucks are different than they were before," General Christianson said. "No longer can they just deliver cargo. Long term, we have to decide to what level of protection are we going to build these vehicles and that's a very, very important point and we're working through that right now."
What are you going to use BFG 9000s for? Could this ugly weapon be reality? If you could get plasma shot into the field and bend it by gravity force into the direction of enemy, maybe.
To destroy eerything in my path! :-)
After the Iraqi military was defeated in the initial attack, the idea was that our occupation troops would patrol in a much less dangerous environment. Accordingly, follow-on units came with 1/3 of their armor and used thin-skined wheeled vehicles(mostly HMMWVs) for the rest of their units. The situation has changed and we've worked to up-armor the wheels already over there and now, the next two rotational units--3d Inf Div and 3d Armored Cav Regt--are coming with 100% of their armored vehicles; mostly tanks & Bradleys, but some M113s as well.
Hehehe
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