Writing in the Wall Street Journal, the excellent Greg Jaffee explains why we don't have enough armored humvees. One of many reasons is that the Pentagon believed the year-2000 campaign claims of George W. Bush that the era of "nation-building" and "peace-keeping" was over:
Posted by DeLong at March 21, 2004 04:57 PM | TrackBackWSJ.com - Cold-War Thinking Prevented Vital Vehicle From Reaching Iraq: A decade ago, the Army began producing an armored Humvee capable of providing protection from many roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades. Like most soldiers in Iraq, Capt. Cameron Birge hasn't set foot in one of those vehicles. Instead, he leads convoys through one of the country's most violent regions in a Humvee -- the modern successor to the Jeep -- with a sheet-metal skin that can't even stop bullets from a small-caliber handgun. To shield himself, Capt. Birge removed his Humvee's canvas doors and welded on slabs of scrap metal. He spread Kevlar blankets over the seats and stacked sandbags on the floor. On the eve of the war in Iraq, just 2% of the Army's world-wide fleet of 110,000 Humvees were armored, and the Army was planning to cut back its purchases. As late as last May, the Army saw little need for the armored Humvee, saying it needed only 235 of them in Iraq. Only in October, with its soldiers under daily attack, did the Army decide it needed 3,100 armored Humvees. Today, the requirement stands at 4,500 and climbing -- a number the Army doesn't expect to hit in Iraq until late this summer or early fall....
Army officials insist that no one could have predicted that the service would have been involved in such a huge peacekeeping effort, which dwarfs previous missions to the Balkans, Haiti and Somalia. Nor could the Army have predicted Iraqi insurgents would use remote-detonated roadside bombs so effectively to kill U.S. soldiers, says Brig. Gen. Jeff Sorenson, a senior Army procurement official. "We didn't anticipate this threat nor were we prepared for it," the general says....
[In 1992] soldiers cruising the streets of Somalia in a thin-skinned Humvee ran over a land mine. Four Americans died, and the Army issued an urgent call to field 10 of the early armored Humvees. The vehicles were being offloaded in Mogadishu when Army Rangers got into a nightlong firefight that killed 18 Americans -- many of them fighting from thin-skinned Humvees. Days later the Army withdrew, leaving a small contingent of Marines. When the Army tried to take the armored Humvees back to the U.S., the Marines protested. "I got a frantic call from a captain telling me the Marines weren't going to let the Army take their [armored] Humvees home," recalls retired Lt. Col. J.C. Hudson, who accompanied the armored vehicles to Mogadishu. Col. Hudson says he told the young captain to let the Marines keep the vehicles.
In the wake of the Somalia debacle, Army officials in charge of the Humvee program were eager to find a niche for the armored version, which at $180,000 costs more than twice as much as the regular vehicle. The program's most enthusiastic backers were military police, who specialize in riot control, peacekeeping and stabilizing an area following combat. But officials involved in the program worried that the Army might not embrace a peacekeeping vehicle. They were also concerned the relatively small military-police force, which boasts no three- or four-star generals, lacked "the horsepower to get the armored Humvee built," says John Weaver, an Army program manager who oversaw the service's Humvee fleet. So Mr. Weaver and his colleagues instead pitched the armored Humvee as a scout vehicle that would venture out in front of the tanks during big battles and beam back information about the enemy. The armored Humvee proved terrible at that job....
Other dangerous missions kept the program alive. In 1995, as U.S. troops readied to deploy to Bosnia, senior Pentagon officials, worried about road mines and snipers, once again put out an urgent call for armored Humvees.... Speaking to a conference of senior Army officers in 1996, Mr. Weaver, a program manager overseeing the Humvee fleet, castigated the service for the way it had handled the armored-Humvee program. "The knee-jerk reactions exhibited in response to Somalia and Bosnia, when all of a sudden someone realized we needed protection, did not result in cost- or operationally effective solutions," he said. Instead of rushing to add armored Humvees prior to each conflict, Mr. Weaver urged the Army to develop a peacetime plan to buy more of these badly needed vehicles and to add armor to its truck fleet. The Cold War model of warfare, in which the tanks were out front protecting the wheeled vehicles, was no longer relevant, he insisted. In places like Somalia and Bosnia, there were no front lines.
The Army didn't embrace his advice. As the situation in the Balkans began to stabilize, the Army, searching for funds amid the defense cutbacks of the 1990s, once again began to reduce armored-Humvee production. The program suffered another blow in 1999 when the Army decided the armored Humvee wouldn't work as a scout vehicle. At the time, the Army's top priority was finding money for its Future Combat System, which officials say will replace the 70-ton battle tank and should be able to do everything from high-end combat to peacekeeping. The system, which the Army hopes to field starting around 2010, will depend on unmanned surveillance planes, robotic sensors and human scouts to determine the enemy's whereabouts. Computers linked by wireless modems will then disseminate the data to troops -- who will spread out over the battlefield and attack simultaneously from several directions before the enemy can even get off a shot. Instead of armor, these new units will rely on better intelligence, munitions and speed to survive. The Army plans to spend about $3.2 billion on research and development for that force this year.
In comparison, the armored Humvee seemed like a minor leap forward. And there were other reasons for the Army to think it didn't need more of the vehicles: When President Bush took office, he seemed to be intent on paring back the military's peacekeeping commitments in the Balkans, and keeping U.S. forces out of similar engagements in the future....
Wow Brad, why you always harpin' on the prezident. How come you never go for the demmicrats. They must be up to somethin' as regularly as the republicans.
I used to come to this site and it was so even handed. Everybody got trashed. Now you sound like someone on the Kerry campaign.
Get a life. Fuckin' librul. Sinserely,
RANDI
P.S. Bush in 2004!
P.P.S. (sarcasm off).
Posted by: randi on March 21, 2004 05:07 PMWas this meant to be a tongue-in-cheek parody of Bush-bashing, or was it meant in earnest? I'm hoping the former rather than the latter.
Reading this article, I don't see how the Bush administration is especially to blame here. In fact, given that the piece mentions calls in 1995, 1996 and 1999 for additional Humvees, I'd say it's the *Clinton* administration that is especially at fault here. The only place in which Bush is mentioned is towards the end of the material you quote, strongly suggesting that the author of the piece placed this pretty low on his list of reasons for the shortage.
Posted by: Abiola Lapite on March 21, 2004 05:12 PMAbiola,
Well, it IS the WSJ...
The article, FWIW, places most of the blame on the Army. While the President is commander in chief, deciding how many armored vs. unarmored Humvees the Army should get is quite a few steps below his pay grade. The same argument could apply to Bush, except...
Bush's role in elevating the situation from fiasco to crisis was in implementing a foreign policy that would drastically increase the number of troops who would need the protection of armored Humvees-- and failing utterly to realize and/or acknowledge what would happen, despite considerable evidence. The Army went along for a variety of dubious reasons, not least of which was that they really wanted to believe that Bush would get them out of the peacekeeping/occupation business and back into what they'd consider more agreeable roles.
Money isn't the issue, because Humvee armor and flak jackets aren't that expensive. The issue is whether or not the administration and the military are adequately assessing their own hardware needs, and, if not, why not.
Posted by: Tom Marney on March 21, 2004 05:35 PMI try to keep my comments to my self on this blog as I know nothing about economics. I do know something about armored vehicles as I spent 10 years working in design and production of the M59 and M113 APC's.
I spent a short time in Viet Nam with a team of people evaluating battle damaged M113s and trying to come up will improvements that would improve the protection against mine and RPG attack.
A little background: the M113(20,000 lbs bare) is constructed of 5383/5386 aluminum armour. It has 3 inches of side armour, on each side; 1-1/2inches of frountal armour, 1-1/2 inch top armour and 1 inch of bottom armour. The original design was for use by airbourn troups initially - this is the reason for the use of aluminum. The armor thickness was selected to protect the troupers from indirect artillary fire and and light weapons direct fire. During our Viet Nam trip we interviewed M48 tank operators as well as M113 personel. From the interviews we found that a RPG hitting normal to the side armor would penetrate completely through the 100 inch width of the vehicle and exit the other side. The same could happen to the much heavier armored M48. One M48 was hit in the rotation band of the main gun turret passing thru the armor there and then through the rotation bearing and exiting out the other side of the vehicle.
Mines were the main concern of the M113 troupers. As a test we added 1 inch of steel armor to the bottom plate and exposed the vehicle to a US made anti tank mine. The explosion threw the M113 about 20 feet in the air where it did a 1-1/2 gainer before hitting the ground. The additional armor did not prevent penetration of the crew compartment.
You can see where this is leading to. There is not a hell of a lot that can be done to protect our guys from mine and RPG fire in a armored vehicle so I don't know what can be done to beef up a thin skinned light weight vehicle like the HumVee. My advice would be to forget about HumVees and give them all Bradleys or M113s. At least then they would have some protection from light weapons and a better but not much better chance against mines.
The Viet Cong knew to the oz the amount of explosives needed to knock out a tank, an APC, a truck or a jeep. I expect with a bit of experience the Irakies will do the same.
The best protection we can give our troups would be to bring them home as fast as possible.
When a vehicle passes *over* an explosive charge as it detonates, it takes huge amounts of armor to survive. However, for *nearby* charges, it takes much less. So light armor can protect against common and easily done things like a charge in the ditch next to the road.
Armor can also protect against smaller charges, which is good if the enemy doesn't have easy access to large charges (probably not the case in Iraq) or has problems emplacing large charges. A grenade-sized object is much easier to quickly drop and hide, than an artillery shell. I've come across some description of activity in Iraq which mentioned that US troops keep an eye on nearby roads; anybody digging near them will be 'investigated'. In response, the enemy has switch from larger, dug-in charges to smaller, 'drop and scoot' charges.
Barry,
Our guys in Viet Nam had to post a 24 hour continuous road patrol to prevent setting of mines. The tankers would watch the kids along the road to see if they were putting their fingers in their ears which was a good sign the the road was mined.
Most of the mines were provided by the US as dud rounds. Our guys in the field had to be careful not to leave trash (spent cartridges juice cans you name it) in any operational area as almost anything we left in the field could be fashioned into a weapon.
Another point, the RPG is a shoulder fired weapon with a very light weight charge - at most a couple of lbs.
I have read that we did not secure Iraqs weapons dumps very well so I expect there is a lot of stuff waiting to be used against us and whoever we leave in charge after June.
My point was the difficulty of protecting our vehicles against a determined enemy. I am not sure armored HumVees would be more than "feel good" for our troupers. Instead of "bring em on" I say bring them home.
I'm working on the FCS.
It's seriously neat stuff, and seriously Buck Rodgers.
For details, I'll leave that to Google.
That being said, there is an article in Aviation Week about the Comanche helicopter cancellation, which mentions the problems that the Army had as an integrator, and how this might effect the FCS.
For me, it's job security. ;)
Posted by: Matthew Saroff on March 21, 2004 08:25 PMdd
It's always a pleasure to read something where the poster has actually intimate knowledge of the subject. None of this a priori stuff.
Thank you, sincerely for putting all this flack about armor-plated ( coats, trousers, undees, you name it) junk in it's place. (The waste basket)
And yes, bring them home.
Hey, if you haven't noticed fighting the last war is Standard Operating Procedure in all them fancy army fighting manuals. :-)
Actually the Army response time this conflict has been nothing short of miraculous. It's only taken them on average between 2-3 months to correctly assess the problem and about 6 months to adapt. This is record time for the military. I'm not joking here.
What it was before that, you can only shudder to contemplate. In Vietnam, the Colt co. sent a letter to army telling them that the M-16 wasn't ready to go into battle. Nonetheless, the Pentagon ordered full deployment and kids had to write home to their parents to write to their congressional representatives that they were having to knick AK-47's off dead Viet Cong and NVA in order to get a weapon that wouldn't jam.
Now I hear that they're actually shifting over to the shorter barrelled M-4 which is better for vehicular deployment and urban close-range environments. You'd think this would be a no-brainer, but hey this is the military. That they realized it all without having their noses rubbed in it was a vast improvement from many years hence. That and they almost have enough ammo this time around, rather than Gulf I which if it hadn't been so short our guys might have been in real trouble since some of them were real short on ammo.
This may sound like cyncism, but it's optimism. Those who - like neocons- have some sort of vision of war as high tech, precision, and high accuracy based have no idea what a bloody butcher's abbattoir and clusterf*ck it really is.
That's why they call war hell. Cause of what the enemy does, cause of what you have to do to win, and cause of the men chewed up and spit out for no better reason than some idiot officer or clerk checked or did not check the right/wrong box somewhere up the line or similarly stupid and pointless and wasted loss of life.
War is messy and difficult to control. Indeed one could argue that no general has successfully pursued and won the same war he started out fighting. That's because situations change rapidly in war time.
Spitfire and Hurricane pilots during the Battle of Britain, were forbidden to install armour by the powers that be - apparently to save weight and improve performance. I recently saw a TV programme about the excavation of a crashed Hurricane which had armour installed by the Squadron CO against orders. The pilot had been injured in the shoulder by a bullet which came through the gap in the armour for his seat harness. Two other bullets had hit the armour - one behind his head, the other in the area of his spine. This was clear from the excavated armour. The expression on the pilots face as he handled the piece of metal which had saved his life some 60 years ago was salutory.
The comment above about the US army M16 is also salutory, given the British Army problems with its own weaponry.
It seems as if Commanders in Chief are fighting not the last battle but two or three before that!
Posted by: Ian on March 22, 2004 07:01 AMOldman: "War is messy and difficult to control. Indeed one could argue that no general has successfully pursued and won the same war he started out fighting. That's because situations change rapidly in wartime."
Eisenhower: "In war, any individual plan will always turn out to be useless, but the PROCESS of planning is essential in order to consider contingencies."
Unfortunately, in the case of Iraq there's no evidence that the civilian neocons had any interest whatsoever in planning for the unexpected.
Posted by: Bruce Moomaw on March 22, 2004 08:41 AMI have read that Bradley "fighting vehicles" in Iraq
have become "rhinos in a cage" with the addition of a framework of steel bars attached 16 inches (??) outside the body; that this cage provides a defense against RPGs, which explode in contact with the cage rather than on the body of the vehicle. Sounds like an ingenious USA in-the-field improvement, soldiers are saying that it has saved their lives. What do you experts think?
Dear Moomaw,
You are correct. The most important thing in war from a tactical and strategic view point is adapatibility, improvisation, contigency planning, and active intelligence.
From a logistical point of view it's different of course. These guys in charge started out with the opposite premise. They knew exactly what would happen and they didn't have to think about anything else. Hence when the situation changed, they got stuck in a rut. I won't call it a quagmire - yet - but things are looking awfully sticky over there with al-Sistani using their Basic Law as toilet paper.
Posted by: Oldman on March 22, 2004 05:38 PMJ, the "rhinos in a cage" look dates back from the Vietnam War, and was a desperate attempt to keep RPG's from destroying M113's. It worked to a certain extent -- it catches the RPG round before it hits the armor, and hopefully keeps it from penetrating -- but this is just another pointed reminder that we're fighting the Vietnam War again. Unfortunately a lot of the boys are having to call back home to Daddy or Grandpa who fought in Vietnam to figure out what to do 'cause the current Army "leadership" doesn't have a clue. The good thing is that the wisdom IS trickling up from the ranks up to the chain of command to the CO's, which doesn't happen in totally disfunctional organizations such as the Saddam-era Iraqi Army. The Army's leadership is clueless, but not stupid -- once wisdom comes up from the ranks, they're swift to adopt it as their own innovation (heh!).
The Strykers that are being deployed to select combat brigades are also getting the cages, for much the same reason -- an RPG round will ricochet right through them otherwise. Note that the Stryker was supposed to be the "armored vehicle of the future", that obsoleted the MBT. Yeah right :-}. About the only thing the Stryker has going for it is that, with its big rubber road wheels, it's not as succeptible to the sand as the M1 and M2. The M1 has had serious and severe road wheel wear in addition to its persistent engine problems (the turbine engine that powers the M1 went out of production back in '91, and the M1 engine now accounts for 67% of the M1's maintenance costs -- and 25% of the Army's maintenance costs overall -- and that's in PEACETIME, I shudder to see what's happening with all the sand in Iraq). The M2 has serious track wear and road wheel problems in the Iraqi sands, and if a track seizes up, much like the M113 losing a shoe it'll pitch the M2 into a ditch (the cause of so many of the "traffic accidents" that you hear about that are killing our young soldiers... the sand is literally eating our equipment alive, and the Army's parts and repair system isn't going to be caught up until August at the earliest).
In short, instead of mud clogging our weapons, we have sand. Instead of Viet Cong, we have mujahdeen. I guess George W. Bush repented of not serving in Vietnam, so he had to create his own Vietnam so that he could serve (turkey, on Thanksgiving Day) in Vietnam. Thanks, George!
Posted by: BadTux on March 22, 2004 07:43 PM