The Redhunter

It's Not That Simple, Stupid

In addition to crystal balls, the critics have extraordinary project management and mechanical abilities. All that you do is fire off some paperwork, a factory starts slapping armor on Humvees, and you ship them off to Iraq. How hard can that be?

Pretty hard, according to W Thomas Smith, who wrote about this issue a few days ago for National Review. His story got me thinking about this entire subject again. I first wrote about Humvee armor last December, when this issue came to the forefront at a meeting between Rumsfeld and some troops. With additional information from Smith's article, it's time for another post.

Smith looked into why it seemingly took so long to get uparmored Humvees into the field. No matter where he looked, he got the same four answers

* These things take time.
* Replacing the Humvee is not really what it's all about.
* The Humvee was not designed to handle mine and IED attacks.
* It is far more complex than anyone realizes.

Critics like to bring up World War II. During that war, the time between initial design and production could be measured in months (double digits, but months nevertheless). True enough, but this misses several critical points.

Quality control was sacrificed to meet the demand for quantity. Not that manufacturing was "slipshod" or anything, but it was expected that a relatively high percentage would break or crash. About 50% of our aircraft losses during the war were from non-combat causes; take off or landing accidents, weather, simply getting lost, or mechanical failure. If this occured today it would be national scandal.

With tanks we sacriciced technical superiority as well. Our best tank of the war, the M-4 Sherman, was decidedly inferior to the worst German tank (the Pz 4) at the time it went into production, and we knew it. We deliberately decided not to design a more advanced tank because we thought quantity better than quantity.

Now think about that a minute. "Quantity over quality". And the enemies tanks are superior. Can you say "cannon fodder"? The entire strategy of "overwhelming the enemy with numbers" presupposes that you will take horrendous losses while doing so, which we did.

Lastly, weapons were less complex back then. Yes, so was design and manufacturing techniques, but in the final analysis it is simply easier to produce a piston engine fighter than a modern one. Those who advocate that we build "more, and cheaper" weapons don't know what they are talking about(remember Gary Hart in the 1980s?). "More and cheaper" weapons don't work for a number of reasons I don't have time to get into here but if I remember I'll take that up in another post.

Yes I know there's a difference between a Humvee and an F-22, but uparmoring a Humvee is still complicated.

You Can't Just Snap Your Fingers

Smith tells us why it's not so simple

Presidents, Defense secretaries, and generals can't just issue orders that vehicles be built.

Once all options are weighed, including accepting the realities like weight reduces speed and nothing can protect against all and changing threats, the military makes the decision as to exactly what type of vehicles it needs to win wars and save lives.

Then the big vendor companies — like General Dynamics, United Defense, and Boeing — which are geared-up to manufacture large numbers of already contracted combat armored vehicles, aircraft, and other weapons systems; must choose to compete for the new project by conceptualizing, designing, and developing a new system which ultimately their company may never be contracted to produce in numbers large enough to justify their own development. Yet, those companies have to retool some of their operations for specific R&D if they hope to compete. The risk and cost is enormous.

Consequently, smaller start-up companies able to expend all of their energies on a specific design characteristic or particular vehicle are often the best way for the government to go: But only if those companies have the start-up capital to begin designing without a contract.

Then the companies — whether monolithic defense contractors or small start-ups hoping to win a big government contract — have to factor in the reality that the dynamics of the battlefield are constantly changing. For example: Lately, there have been fewer IED attacks in Iraq, but the mines and the roadside bombs are much larger.

Each time the threat changes, the scientists have to go back to the labs; the engineers to their drawing boards; the marksmen, explosives experts, and test drivers back to the ranges.

The Next Generation

My perception is that it is not common knowledge, but the military has been hard at work fielding new vehicles.

The MUV-R's manufacturer, South Carolina-based Force Protection, is currently producing much-larger mine-and-blast protective vehicles — the Buffalo and the Cougar — which are already in service with U.S. forces in Iraq. The Buffalo, which CBS News' Bob Schieffer called a "Humvee on steroids," is a mine-clearance vehicle. The Cougar is a troop transport, but geared for the same market that the M113 armored personnel carrier would be. Not a Humvee.

Therein lies the problem.

"The Humvee is a glorified jeep," says Blount. But the Army and Marines are now using the Humvee for a purpose for which it was never intended.

So it's not so much a question of replacing the Humvee, as much as it is developing a brand new armored vehicle with the same speed, climb, and general off-road performance capabilities of a Humvee.

That may well be the MUV-R, and that vehicle could be on the ground and running in the fourth quarter of 2006, a phenomenal feat considering the concept was realized one year ago. And vehicles weren't initially slated to roll of the line until 2007.

Today, a fully armored proof-of-concept vehicle is charging over the hills and racing around the mud and red clay roads in the backcountry of South Carolina, not far from where the Buffalo and Cougar are manufactured in Ladson.

At 10-12 tons — more than twice the weight of an up-armored Humvee — the MUV-R cruises at 65 miles per hour with burst speeds of up to 80. It can carry 6-to-10 fully armed soldiers, and it has a roof-mounted weapons system, remotely controlled by the right front-seat passenger, giving a whole new meaning to the term, "riding shotgun."

Moreover, the vehicle's design features can enable it to withstand — basically deflecting — enormous blast and ballistic impact from every angle.

I can't find the "MUV-R" on the internet, and don't have time now for an extensive search (if you find it please let me know). But I do encourage everyone to check out the links to the Cougar and Buffalo, one, because the photos make it clear that they're not just glorified Humvees, and second because the performance specs are fairly impressive.

The Next War

It used to be that it was said that "generals and admirals always want to fight the last way". In other words, they think the next war will be like the last, and request weapons accordingly. The best example of this is the Maginot Line. French generals thought that any future war with Germany would be like World War I, so they planned for a defensive campaign. Ooops.

Now, however, it is the civilians, and war critics in particular, who seem to to think that all future wars will be like Iraq. They tell us we don't need the F-22 (guess the China-Taiwan controversy will magically disppear) or advanced warships (ditto). We are told that Iraq is the wave of the future.

What nonsense.

There are at least three possible conflicts that may break out in the next five years, all of which will require high-tech weapons on our part.

China/Taiwan - My analysis shows that there is a good chance the PRC will make it's move shortly after the 2008 Olympics in Bejing. If we do get into a war with them over Taiwan, it will be an old-fashioned shoot-out on the high seas coupled with (or mainly) air battles overhead.

Iran - Everyone knows they are developing nuclear weapons. Their president, and many before him, have stated that once they have them they'll use them against Israel. Any war with Iran will necessitate the use of our most advanced aircraft and weaponry.

North Korea - It is not terribly likely that Kim Jong il will send his army south, it is possible that war could erupt. Much of it will be a nasty ground campaign, but in order to take out the massive amount of artillery he has hidden in the mountains just north of Seoul, not to mention taking out his nuclear assets (another debate I know), we will again need high-tech aircraft and weaponry.

History and More History

The critics seem to think that this incident is unique in history. At least this is my general perception, but I think it correct.

The first time I looked at the issue of Humvee armor I did a little survey of all that we did wrong in World War II and Vietnam and came up with this:

We entered World War II with 80% of our torpedoes being defective. That's right, folks, up to 80% of the torpedoes that we fired didn't work for one or more of three reasons: they dove too deep, they failed to explode on contact, or they detonated en route to the enemy ship, the magnetic detector being the culprit (ideally a torpedo goes under the enemy ship and detonates to achieve maximum damage, thus a magnetic detector is required to detect the steel of the ship).

Not only did we enter the war with inferior and outright lousy tanks, we never did achieve parity with the Germanys. The reasons why we stuck with the venerable Sherman are many (and some quite valid), but that does not excuse the fact that we entered the war with inferior tanks. (Note to techies; yes I know this issue, like all others concerning military hardware, is very complex).

The Shermans that we did finally build couldn't deal with the hedgerow country in Normandy in the days and weeks after the D-Day invasion. The tanks became stuck in the hedgerows that were all over the area and became bogged down. Finally a US sergeant came up with the idea of welding a fork-like scoop to the front of the tanks. When they came to a hedgerow they were able to plow the hedges up and keep moving. None of this was anticipated, as arguably it should have.

However one comes down on the debate about US tanks, no one can dispute that our aircraft were almost universally inferior, especially to those the Japanese had. Our F4F Wildcat couldn't match the famous Mitsubishi Zero, the F2A Buffalo was a joke, the and TBD Devastator obsolete . At least theSBD Dauntless was a good aircraft.

We went into Vietnam with F-4 Phantom fighter aircraft that didn't have guns. In our infinite wisdom we had thought that the days of gunbattles in the sky were over and everything would be decided by missiles. Wrong. Pilots quickly discovered that while missiles were preferred, there were many cases where only a gun would do. To rectify the situation we strapped a gun onto the center hard-point of the Phantoms (or some of them anyway), and only later reincorporated a gun into the aircraft.

Victor Davis Hanson, in an article in National Review last February, reminded us of other things that we seem to have forgotten:

Most of our armored vehicles were deathtraps, improved only days before the surrender. American torpedoes in the Pacific were often duds. Unescorted daylight bombing proved a disaster, but continued unabated. Amphibious assaults like Anzio and Tarawa were bloodbaths, plagued by terrible planning and command. The recapture of Manila was clumsy and far too costly. Okinawa was the worst of all operations, and yet was begun just over four months before the surrender — without careful planning for kamikazes, who were shortly to kill nearly 5,000 American sailors. Patton, the one general who could have ended the western war in 1944, was earlier relieved and then subordinated to an auxiliary position with near-fatal results for the drive from Normandy. Mediocrities like Mark Clark flourished and were promoted. Admiral King for far too long resisted the life-saving convoy system and thus unnecessarily sacrificed merchant ships; Admiral Bull Halsey almost lost his unprepared fleet to a storm.

No I am not excusing true incompetence. What I am saying is that it is in the nature of war that unexpected things happen, one of which is that sometimes you end up needing different weapons than the ones you thought you needed. It's easy to say that someting should have been done "faster", and to be sure there's always room for improvement, but from where I sit the Pentagon handled the situation regarding Humvee armor reasonably well.