I concur.
``I suppose those who would seek to make a point on behalf of Crusader would say `if it had been there, with it's range and with its rate of fire, it would have been a very effective weapon.' On the other side, one says that given the characteristics of that particular fight, it probably wouldn't have been there. The tactical commander decided based on weight, mobility and characteristics of the sort of systems he wanted to use.''
For all the armchair generals out there who are up in arms that we need this tactical 'ball and chain' called Crusader, just one more piece of evidence that it is not what the warfighters want out of the system.
Of course heavy divisions are used in flat or in industrialized country, which just happens to be most of the world where there is anything worth fighting over. Of course specialist forms of light infantry get the other roles. Snake eaters are not the wave of the future. Light is not the wave of the future. The future of ground warfare is going to be dominated by the revolution in *firepower* brought about by the advent of widespread and cheap smart munitions.
An increased role of firepower does not council maneuverist doctrine, nor riding around in LAV tin cans with less combat power than Vietnam era M113s. It definitely does council blowing away whole maneuver brigades with over the horizon smart artillery firepower from 20 miles away. Which Crusader will do, when cheap IR sensors are put into every ICM bomblet. From beyond range of effective reply. Firepower kills, that is the future of ground warfare.
And it is perfectly reasonable for both officers and civilian legislators who know all of this to tell the self-appointed maneuverist gurus trying to run the revamping of the army that they are flat wrong about this stuff. Because they are. Many officers know it.
The maneuverists are in fact stuck in a hidebound 1940 era doctrine, and do not have a doctrinal place for firepower-ascendent warfare in which the maneuver elements (infantry and armor battalions) are subordinate to the firepower arms (artillery and air). Because firepower ascendent warfare councils attritionist doctrine - expending ammo from firepower arms at the main body of enemy fielded forces, instead of avoiding his main body to put maneuver elements in his rear areas.
To the maneuverists, this is too unlike Guderian's 1940 era ideas to be true. They equate modernization with being more like Guderian, and less like WW I. Which means more emphasis on maneuver elements and less on firepower elements, especially artillery, and hitting where the enemy isn't instead of applying firepower where he is. They do not notice that this is a hidebound an archaic doctrine rooted in the military realities of the 1940s, because maneuver theory has become an academic cult at the army officer schools, and they never even hear the rival arguments.
But the air force knows better. They focus on decision through firepower. And because that is what works in the era of smart weapons, and because they have the JDAMs and dasiy cutters, the air force fights and wins the nation's wars. While the army holds their coats and bleets about modernization, with their head stuck in 60 year old maneuverist sand. The army has never had a warfighting doctrine as out of touch with the military realities of the age as right now. And that will remain the case until maneuverist orthodoxy is broken, and they face the necessity for serious *doctrinal* changes, that the firepower revolution really brings.
The maneuverists presenting themselves as the wave of the future, by equating "futuristic" with "light", is one of the great snow-jobs of all time. And the men being asked to fight against smart munitions in LAVs sure as heck know it, and are not willing to be the guinea pigs of academic antiquarians dreaming about France 1940 and Russia 1941, casting themselves as Manstein and Guderian. Until the army schools buy a clue (hint - all that 40s stuff is *over*, and firepower again rules), air force boys will run the nation's wars.