Against the hoopla surrounding the selection of a new armored vehicle
for the Army’s so-called “interim brigade combat teams,”
service officials are grappling with the reality that, no matter
what vehicle is chosen, the brigade still is too heavy to deploy
in 96 hours.
The four-day benchmark was mandated by the chief of staff of the
Army, and is intended to make these brigade-size units “quick-reaction”
forces that the United States could dispatch to hot spots around
the world.
The interim brigade combat teams, or IBCTs, will be self-sufficient
units the Army plans to field late next year. Self-sufficiency means
they will not require major overseas airports and seaports to receive
troops and equipment.
Two IBCTs are training at Fort Lewis, Wash. They expect to receive
new interim combat vehicles by March 2001. A contractor for the
nearly $7 billion program was to be chosen last month.
These new vehicles will not be tanks, obviously. The tanks are
the reason the Army has been dubbed “too slow” and “too
large” to be effective in urban conflicts, for example. The
new vehicles will be expected to go to places where tanks can’t
go.
Currently, however, “with the amount of troops we have in
this [IBCT] outfit, we can’t get there in 96 hours,”
said Ty Cobb, acting chief of the advanced systems concepts office
at the Army’s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command (TACOM).
These time estimates, he explained, were based on how many airfields
would be needed to deliver troops and equipment.
TACOM estimated that an IBCT, with about 4,000 troops, must weigh
no more than 7,800 short tons to meet the 96-hour goal.
Each IBCT has three infantry battalions. It will have 18 155 mm
towed howitzers, 340 armored vehicles and 543 tactical wheeled vehicles.
Every platoon has Javelin anti-tank weapons. Configured as such,
this IBCT weighs nearly 12,000 short tons, and would need between
7.5 and 10.9 days to deploy, said Cobb, during a recent TACOM-sponsored
conference in Dearborn, Mich.
If the howitzers were substituted by wheeled high-mobility artillery
rocket systems, called the HIMARS, the weight would drop by nearly
1,000 short tons, and the deployment time would be shortened to
between six and nine days. But, “as it stands today, we cannot
get there in 96 hours,” Cobb said. To reach the weight of
7,800 short tons, the brigade only would be able to bring two infantry
battalions, and no howitzers.
Paul Chiodo, acting associate technical director of TACOM’s
Armaments Research, Development and Engineering Center, said some
weight reductions are expected in the future, with the introduction
of a new 155 mm howitzer, a joint Marine-Army system that is scheduled
to begin production in 2002 or 2003. That howitzer weighs 17,000
pounds, and should drop to 9,000 pounds, said Chiodo.
One way the Army believes it can cut down the weight of the brigade
in the near future, Cobb asserted, is by slashing the amount of
supplies brought to the battle.
Most of that “logistics support” weight is in the form
of fuel and water.
TACOM currently is studying the use of advanced fuels and lubricants
as a potential assist in lightening the logistics load.
Gilbert Piesczak, team leader of advanced vehicle technologies
at TACOM, said his office is looking at fuel additives, synthetic
lubricants and new refinery processes. The goals, he said, are to
increase fuel economy, lower maintenance workload and enhance fuel
energy. But this program probably will not affect the IBCT in the
near term. Piesczak said these technologies should be ready by 2004.
There are efforts under way to try to reduce the demand for water,
he said. That means technologies that can produce fresh water in
the field. A soldier needs seven to eight gallons of water a day.
For a brigade, that averages to 106 short tons a day, which amounts
to 40 percent of the brigade tonnage of 265 short tons, Piesczak
explained.
One technique would be to reclaim water from exhaust fuel, which
could result in 3/4 gallon of water for each gallon of fuel. This
project should be complete by 2004. Another technology is called
meso-distillation, which produces two gallons of water per hour
from various sources of heat in a vehicle.
There are no immediate solutions to lowering the logistics-related
weight, said Cobb. But there are proposals being studied by the
Army on how the IBCT could reach its ideal 7,800 short ton-weight.
Among the suggestions, said Cobb, are to “pre-position equipment”
in remote locations around the world, and to increase the reliance
on private-sector contractors for logistics support.
Planning for IBCT
Planning for the IBCT has prompted other types of research, commented
Cobb. “We gathered our project managers from our laboratories
to decide on what technologies we can contribute to IBCT,”
he said. A list of 27 weapon systems was submitted to West Point.
TACOM officials briefed 10 officers and senior non-commissioned
officers—all from war fighting branches—and asked them
to choose which, out of the 27 systems, they would find most useful
if they were IBCT commanders.
Cobb stressed that this group of officers was too small a sample
to be considered a scientific survey, but “it’s sort
of an indicator what they are thinking about.”
Interestingly, said Cobb, the highest-rated weapon was one that
the Army won’t have until 2008: a sophisticated two-man portable
machine gun called the “objective crew-served weapon.”
The OCSW will replace current medium and heavy machine guns, said
Vern Shisler, who works on the program at the Picatinny Arsenal.
It will be 100 pounds lighter than the current heavy machine gun,
he said in an interview. It will fire air-burst high-explosive 25
mm rounds.
The message from this “non-scientific” survey, noted
Cobb, is that a key priority for the IBCT is to be “lethal.”
There have been concerns, for example, within the Army’s
artillery community, that the IBCTs will not have organic self-propelled
howitzers.
Nevertheless, the artillery school at Fort Sill, Okla., is preparing
a “requirements study” that will look at whether the
IBCT needs both towed and self-propelled howitzers, said Allan Resnick,
assistant deputy chief of staff for combat developments at the Army’s
Training and Doctrine Command. “They will come back in about
a year and give us that statement,” he told the TACOM conference.
On the matter of indirect fire for the IBCT, he said, “the
jury is very much out.”