The U.S. Army will receive its new light armored vehicles in February
2002, approximately 28 months after the chief of staff, Gen. Eric
K. Shinseki, announced the service would start trading tracks for
wheels.
The first four LAVs—2,131 are expected to be built over seven
years—will come from London, Ontario. The rest will be assembled
in Lima, Ohio.
Army officials have praised the choice of the eight-wheel LAV III
as the vehicle for the so-called “interim brigade combat teams,”
the front-line units that Shinseki conceived as a lighter, more
mobile alternative to heavy brigades. Any vehicle or weapon platform
used by the IBCTs, Shinseki said, must be able to fit on C-130 medium-lift
cargo airplanes. The plan is to field at least six brigades during
the next decade.
But the notion that the Army’s premier rapid-response force,
the IBCTs, will have only wheeled vehicles has prompted criticism
from retired servicemen and analysts who wonder whether the Army
is wise to do away with tracked platforms in the IBCTs and rely
on a vehicle that has limited ballistic protection. Some critics
also have questioned the “deployability” of the 38,000-pound
LAV, complaining that it requires modifications in order to be able
to roll on and roll off a C-130.
The first two IBCTs, at Fort Lewis, Wash., have been training with
32 Canadian LAVs and will continue to do so until the new vehicles
arrive, said Brig. Gen. Paul Eaton, the Army’s training and
doctrine deputy commander. Each IBCT, he said, will require 217
trips by C-17 heavy-lift planes to deploy—half of the airlift
needed to move a heavy brigade. The Army wants the vehicles to fit
on smaller C-130s, because the Air Force has hundreds of those,
compared to only a few dozen C-17s.
The Army awarded a $4 billion contract last year to a consortium
of General Motors Defense of Canada and General Dynamics Land Systems,
in Sterling Heights, Mich., for the development and production of
the LAV III. The LAV is a derivative of Switzerland’s Mowag
Piranha. The design was licensed to General Motors Defense, which
now owns Mowag. Different versions of the LAV are used by various
countries around the world. The U.S. Marine Corps has operated a
Generation I version of the LAV for more than 20 years. The LAV
that the Army selected is a Piranha Generation III.
For the U.S. Army’s program, 50 percent of the work will
be done in the United States, 32 percent in Canada and 18 percent
in other countries (Germany, Israel and the United Kingdom).
During a news conference in Washington, Eaton said he expects to
have a fully-equipped LAV brigade by the second or third quarter
of 2003. He told reporters that the LAV is not a “peacekeeping
vehicle,” even though the IBCTs were designed to fight in
“small-scale contingencies.”
In Pentagonese, small-scale contingencies mean operations such
as non-combatant evacuations, peacekeeping and humanitarian relief
missions. In these missions, “one doesn’t simply go
in and blow everything apart, what in Vietnam came to be known as
‘destroying the village to save it,’” said Dan
Smith, a retired Army colonel and defense analyst.
Troops participating in small-scale contingencies, Smith said,
focus on “fundamental patrolling, area security, and techniques
of dispute mitigation, such as separating hostile groups using a
display of—but measured—force.”
M-1 tanks and heavy artillery don’t fit these missions, he
added. “Troops need a mobile, fast vehicle that offers sufficient
protection against small arms and most light weapons. ... Rapid
response is paramount, both getting into a theater and then operating
on the ground,” Smith said. “The LAV as an interim vehicle
seems to fit the bill.”
There will be two variants of the LAV III, the infantry carrier
vehicle—which has eight different versions—and the 105
mm mobile gun system. The MGS is not expected to enter service for
several years, because it still requires some development work.
The modifications will shorten the height of the MGS by 10 inches,
in order to fit into a C-130, said Peter Keating, spokesman for
General Dynamics Land Systems. “The MGS was not designed to
be C-130 transportable,” he said.
The turret will be lowered five inches in the hull and the vehicle
will be equipped with a “height management system,”
Keating said, which will shorten the vehicle by five more inches.
“The HMS provides the ability to lower the entire chassis
to meet height restrictions of the aircraft,” said Army Capt.
Steven T. Wall, assistant program manager for IBCT. According to
Wall, the LAV-equipped units will be restricted in how much ammunition,
fuel and other “mission equipment” they can transport,
in order to meet “fly-away weight limits and safety requirements.”
Maj. Gen. Joseph L. Yakovac Jr., program executive officer for
the Army’s ground combat support systems, cautioned that there
is more than one definition of C-130 transportability. “We
don’t anticipate C-130s going into a hot drop zone to get
these vehicles off, and so what you have is a vehicle that’s
capable of coming off, doing minimal reconfiguration and being totally
combat-ready.”
Using a central tire inflation system, Yakovac said during a news
conference, the vehicle can be lowered a few more inches by letting
the air out of the tires.
“We’re comfortable and confident that we have an interim
family of vehicles that is, in fact, C-130 transportable,”
he said.
Meanwhile, the Military Traffic Management Command has begun a
study on the transportability of the LAV on C-130 aircraft. This
is part of a standard evaluation conducted in every vehicle acquisition
program, said William Cooper, director of MTMC’s transportation
engineering agency.
The agency performs “transportability engineering analyses
of every wheeled and tracked vehicle in the U.S. Army inventory
prior to every acquisition milestone in accordance with Army regulations,”
Cooper said. The first of these analyses, of the infantry carrier
vehicle, will be completed on time for the first vehicle delivery
in February 2002, he said.
Cooper stressed that the study was not designed to refute a previous
MTMC white paper on C-130 lift capabilities. That paper was the
source of an article in Army Times that concluded, based on the
white paper’s data, that the LAV in a C-130 would be a “tight
squeeze.”
Regardless of the outcome of the study, it seems clear that the
LAV “meets the transportability requirements set by Gen. Shinseki,”
said Greg Fetter, senior defense analyst at Forecast International
DMS, an industry intelligence firm.
But Fetter said he is bothered by the fact that the IBCTs will
have only LAVs, and no tracked vehicles. “I am not opposed
to wheeled vehicles,” he said. “I think the Army should
have embraced the concept much earlier.” However, he added,
“We don’t know where these brigades will be deployed,
what conditions, what topography.” Fetter is not convinced
that the LAV can maneuver in every type of rugged terrain. “Wheeled
vehicles have come a long way in the last 20 years, [but] they still
cannot totally replace a tracked vehicle for all types of terrain.”
In Fetter’s opinion, the IBCTs should have a mix of LAVs and
M8s, a tracked mobile gun system that the Army developed in the
early 1990s and canceled in 1996.
The Army tested the LAV extensively in different types of terrain,
said Yakovac. But he noted that some mobility had to be sacrificed
to gain other attributes the Army liked in the LAV. “There
are things that you evaluate, and they’re traded off,”
he said. “A difference in mobility was outweighed by the other
capabilities that this [LAV] gave to us.” It is not an “issue
of wheeled versus track,” said Yakovac.
“Wheels have been good for peacekeeping operations,”
said David Grange, a retired Army brigadier general who commanded
the 1st Infantry Division, in Germany. “But in a combat situation,
the mobility will become an issue. You should have flexibility.”
Fielding a light vehicle that can go on a C-130, he said, is “only
part of the equation.”
“The majority of the missions that we had in Somalia, in
Bosnia, Task Force Hawk in Albania, Kosovo were over secondary roads,”
Eaton said. The LAV, he said, can travel at 60 miles an hour and
is comfortable, so the crews are not “worn out by the time
they get out of this vehicle.”
Another feature that the Army agreed to trade off by selecting
the LAV was armor protection, Yakovac explained. He said the Army
is satisfied with the 14.5 mm ballistic protection—7.62 mm
in the basic steel hull and a ceramic appliqué added on top.
The Army also requested an additional appliqué armor package
for protection against rocket-propelled grenades, known as RPGs.
Of most concern is the RPG-7, an infantry-portable light antitank
weapon capable of breaching the armor of a main battle tank at 300
meters. It is reported that it can penetrate about 12 inches of
conventional armor plate. The RPG-7 has been used extensively by
terrorist organizations in the Middle East and Latin America and
is thought to be in the inventory of many countries around the world,
said Fetter. “Everybody has these weapons,” he said.
Fetter said the Army should have embedded, rather than modular,
armored protection in the LAV against both RPG-7s and 20 mm bullets.
“A lot of countries have 20 mm cannon on light wheeled vehicles,”
he said.
As the Army moves forward with the fielding of the LAV, it also
must prepare to conduct a comparative test between the infantry
carrier version of the LAV and the M113, the service’s current
light infantry tracked vehicle. Congress mandated the test in the
fiscal year 2001 defense authorization bill. Among the sponsors
was Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), who claimed the Army was biased
in favor of wheeled vehicles and arbitrarily ruled out an M113 variant
in the competition that the LAV won last year. The M113 is made
by United Defense LP, in Santorum’s home state. The company
protested the Army’s decision last November, but lost the
case.
The comparative evaluation is scheduled for the fourth quarter
of fiscal year 2002. It will rely on “modeling, simulation
and a field exercise,” said Wall, the Army captain.
An Army major general who spoke at a defense industry conference
last month said that the side-by-side test “won’t prove
anything.” The Army, he said, already made its decision. “We’d
rather spend the test money on something else.”