http://www.armyrecognition.com/europe/France/vehicules_a_roues/VAB/VAB_France_description.htm#1http://armyreco.ifrance.com/europe/france/vehicules_a_roues/vbl/vbl_france_description.htmThese lessons learned about equipment and tactics have been well known. The British in Northern Ireland and the Israelis in the West Bank have produced numerous counter-insurgency specific vehicles designed to address IEDs and small arms fire faced in urban environments. The issuance of the Humvee in the 1980s was a defensible decision; its high mobility and light weight made it air-transportable and flexible, in line with the Army's Air Land Battle doctrine. Firepower, Protection, and Mobility are the three main factors of any military vehicle, and the kind of maneuver fast-paced warfare that U.S. military anticipated in Europe during the 1980s reqired a premium on mobility.
But this thin-skinned, unarmored vehicle is entirely inappropriate for urban counterinsurgency warfare, where protection and firepower assume greater importance. The extensive use and provisioning of the Humvee suggests that the Army did not fully anticipate the extent and tactics of the counter-insugency in Iraq, even though there was ample warning from the Israeli experience in Lebanon, as well as mere common sense. Likewise, problems with the Humvee from Panama and Somalia should have alerted the powers that be that this vehicle, without armor and with unarmored gunstations, would lead to unnecessary casualties.
The chief response to this problem has been to add expensive armor packages to existing Humvees. But, one must wonder, why stay with this platform which was never designed for urban warfare, nor is particularly suitable as an armored car. Off-the-shelf armored cars raning from the American V-150 , the German-made Fox (already in inventory), to the French VAB all would be superior, both in terms of protection and mobility. They all have, for instance, more ground clearance, stronger engines, and sloped armor. I speculate that these solutions would be cheaper and more easily available, more quickly than the current retrofitting of armored packages on existing Humvees at the rate of some 400 or so per month.
Each mission dicates a different vehicle. And the Humvee, designed for European armored campaingns, is not the right vehicle for a largely urban counterinsurgency war. Even so, the military has long had a sclerotic approach to adding new vehicles in its fleets. New vehicles complicate logistics and change the Table of Equipment. Acquistitions are also slowed down by the force of bureaucratic intertia; since there is already a "slot" for armored Humvees, it's easier to add them than to replace them in the Iraqi theater, even if they're less effective and more expensive. But these excuses are to be expected from mid-level beureaucrats and the change-resistant Pentagon. The SECDEF and President's leadership is called for. The SECDEF and the President need to cut the Gordian Knot of Pentagon/Army resistance and procure some appropriate, quickly available, low-tech, and reasonably armored alternative to Humvees, armored or otherwise.
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