Posted on 05/08/2004 5:07:27 AM PDT by Cannoneer No. 4
Military understated how many can be made
The secretary of the Army said in November that the military was buying every armored Humvee that could be made.
Politicians and parents pointed out that the factories could turn out thousands more of the steel-plated trucks.
It's the morons in the Senate and House that vote for or against foreign aid and for and against Defense...Not the SOD...
The second question is more difficult to answer. Avoidance of casualties is an unassailably desirable objective. It is precisely the natural nobility of the argument that makes it susceptible to misuse in the policy-making process, potentially leading to ineffective or inefficient choices. The persistence of the myth also causes adversaries to misjudge the likely reactions of the United States. In both of these ways, the myth of deep-seated casualty aversion among the American public hinders the pursuit of American national objectives.The conventional wisdom is strong among civilian, military, and media elites. Steven Kull and I. M. Destler have recorded many interviews-with members of Congress and their staffs, the media, the executive branch, and leaders of nongovernmental organizations-that support this view.3 Other interviews with members of the media and military leaders also confirm a widespread belief that the American public is unwilling to accept casualties.4
If the myth is believed by enough people - enough to affect public policy - it is no longer a myth but reality. The article you cited seems to confirm that the myth is no longer myth.
The Senate Armed Services Committee appropriated $618 million for the reinforced trucks and $610 million more to be spent on truck armor. The measure, an amendment sponsored by Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., still must pass the full Senate.
Politicians and parents pointed out that the factories could turn out thousands more of the steel-plated trucks.
"They have consistently underestimated the need for this kind of protection for our troops," Bayh said. "Unfortunately, soldiers have been killed because of that."[No, soldiers have been killed because of Hadjis shooting them and blowing them up, not because the Army is stupid.]
U.S. casualties mounted through the summer and fall as guerrillas attacked the thin-skinned Humvees. The Pentagon has not said how many of the 776 U.S. deaths or 3,864 wounded through Tuesday occurred in regular Humvees and other work trucks, but unofficial estimates by Newsweek magazine and some soldiers' parents place the number at a quarter to a third. [Apparently the deaths of the other two thirds to three quarters are less easily politicized]
Only after politicians in Washington prodded the Army did the procurement orders rise last fall above the 80-a-month level.
AM General is the lone producer of Humvees. Basic models intended for armoring are shipped to suburban Cincinnati, where O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt puts steel plates and Kevlar in the roof, floor and sides and adds ballistic windows.
Urged by Bayh and others on the Armed Services Committee, the Army raised procurement orders to 220 a month in November, Mecredy said.
Brian Hart said he met Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., at his son's funeral Nov. 4 at Arlington National Cemetery. [What a coincidence.]
Two weeks later, Kennedy grilled Les Brownlee, the secretary of the Army, in a routine Armed Services Committee hearing. Asked whether the Pentagon was obtaining enough armored Humvees, Brownlee responded, "I've been assured we're buying everything they can produce," according to a Nov. 19 transcript.
Hart said he phoned O'Gara-Hess officials and learned the armorer could expand production. In December, Hart alerted several politicians' staff members. The information reached Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., an Armed Services Committee member.
Pressed by Bayh, Kennedy, Reed and others, Brownlee toured AM General and O'Gara-Hess in February. Orders for the armored vehicles soon escalated to 300 a month. The Ohio plant is ramping up for that now.
Well its better than nothing and if the Humvees can be made quickly until bigger stuff can be made, then they have a good plan.
Heavy armor takes more time to build. Give them the up armored humvees in the meantime.
I consider the worry expressed by the thread in some respects legitimate - it is indeed crazy to expect zero casualties - but in the end it is a straw man argument. One side constructs the worst possible argument for a proposition that it can find, and finds a few people advancing it for ulterior motives. That side then argues against that weakest argument instead of against the best one. This decides nothing.
What is really going on here in a wider sense is that methods of propaganda and ideological politics have infected force planning. This is at least a dozen years old, and by now it is a serious problem within the military.
Arguments have been advanced against the heavy army for that long, and are still being advanced, that are based on shallow thinking and slogans and pet theories about the future of warfare. Significant investments have been made in these slogans. Budget fights among services, large future projects, institutional power of various sets, and military careers have all flocked around the proposition, "the heavy army is a cold war dinosaur fit only to fight the Warsaw Pact on the north German plain".
And it simply isn't so.
The old army was then admonished to become "expeditionary", to become deployable at a moment's notice, to get light and flexible and fast, to shorten its logistical tail, etc. And along with all this came force changes that are largely atmospheric in their relation to these largely imaginary objectives. Wheels not tracks. Hummers not Brads. Deployability by air rather than by ship.
In the first few moments of a conflict, these abilities are assets for a portion of the force. It makes sense to have light airborne units and Marines that are this deployable - though the Marines have known for a long time you also need to back that up with some heavy stuff, to keep combined arms effects. But the basic picture of what the army would do that was involved was not correct. And the basic attitude toward heavy armor and its uses was also not correct.
As a fact, we fight major wars with 6 months or more of diplomatic preparation, not 72 hours. We fight in the same places not for days but for years. The threat uses RPGs and mines and mortars; we are lucky they don't have better.
And the reality is heavy armor is decidedly useful against these enemies. The 3rd ID went to Baghdad in record time because of it. We were told urban fighting would be an infantry leading knife fight, but they took Baghdad in days at trivial cost, while slaughtering large numbers of light irregulars doing so.
After the peak combat phase it remains useful. Pinpoint direct HE is useful, mobile MG firepower is useful, protection from snipers and nearby IEDs is extremely useful, and protection in addition from RPGs, while gravy, is a good thing to have available in many situations.
All of this could have been predicted and in fact was. The Israelis know it, for example. But those saying so were not listened to, because they seemed to stand in the way of the whole light deployable etc plan. Which every other branch of service had already invested in, ideologically or in sloganeering terms.
Rumsfeld bought into this because he was told it was so by practically everybody. Even the leaders of the army during the Clinton era transitioned to those willing to go along with this slogan driven campaign, to accomodate the pressures being put on the heavy army to get rid of its internal institutional knowledge and instead follow the new slogan driven directives. Light forces within the army rode this internal-external power field to careerist dominance. Rummy is a national treasure, but on this subject he has naturally followed the bulk of the expert advice he received.
It is just a mistake. A honest one, a typical peacetime one. Planners think AB and C will be the critical matters in the next war, it comes along and in reality it is C, L and Z. Simple mistakes just get noticed and corrected. Institutions are healthy when they can do this, when ideological creeds do not destroy ability to recognize such things and adapt to them.
What we are seeing with the Hummer story is resistence to learning and adapting, being overridden by reality, from the bottom up. Soldiers that did not have much protection simply went and got it. We had Spec 4s prowling Iraqi junkyards for sheet metal, and PFCs filling sand bags to line the floors of their trucks. We have junior officers signing 6 figure contracts with Iraqi metal dealers to weld extra plate onto their vehicles. And we have units fighting each other to get hold of uparmored rather than plain Hummers, fighting over whether they rotate stateside with their units or stay, etc.
Anybody who likes can pretend to decry the process. But it is a straw man to pretend it is driven by pols here, or by veiled defeatism, or anything of the sort. Our men in the field are doing it. Their higher ups are being dragged along. And the result is certainly not optimal. Uparmored Hummers aren't that much better protected and they strain the suspension etc. Meanwhile, tons of heavy armor we've had all the time in the world to deploy, that our men are trained to use, has already been paid for long since and is sitting around being inventoried.
It is not being used because using it would validate a future role for it that the sloganeers are still resisting. But this is a poor reason. Ideas about the likely future ways we will fight are meant to help us adapt our fighting methods. If instead they prevent our doing so, they are not entirely helpful. If the whole process occurred in a basically professional and technocratic atmosphere, through chains of command, this would be relatively easy to recognize and act upon.
Such institutional knowledge is resisted as hidebound and unwilling to change. Slogans and the shallow thinking they bring are one way of promoting change and overriding objections. Sometimes that may be necessary. But it has a downside, which is inability to recognize when the old conventional wisdom is simply right, and revolutionaries have thrown a baby out with some bathwater.
Heavy armor is such a baby. We should stop squabbling about it, accept the fact, and go get him.
Opposition to heavy armor does not stem from a desire to avoid a peacekeeping army. It comes from a picture of the future of typical missions that stresses deployability and 72 hour response times and as short a logistical tail as possible, over both immediate firepower and long term casualty reduction in an environment like Iraq. Both of which, a heavier force is better at.
The opposition to using heavy armor comes primarily from future implications of its success or of relying on it. Planners don't want to fund another generation of it. They don't want to worry about how to deploy it and keep it supplied. They wanted heavy firepower needs to be turned over to the air force, and they imagined force protection would be accomplished simply by rapid victory and immediate exit (or just a parade). These were not realistic projections, as events have shown.
Then 3ID took Baghdad.
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