Armored Cav: A Guided Tour of an Armored Cavalry Regiment
JACK RYAN ENTERPRISES, LTD., BY LAURA ALPHER
13 By the close of the third day, the VII Corps was fully engaged in its assigned task, holding and destroying the Iraqi Republican Guards armored divisions in its sector. As day three wound down and day four began, General Franks’ primary problem was to keep all of the elements of VII Corps engaged in the fight, “marching to the sound of the guns” as he is fond of saying. Thus, his activities took on the form of sorting out the battlefield and working hard at traffic management.
During the final hours of the morning of February 28th, 1991, the corps continued to attack and engage Iraqi units until the cease-fire at 0800 (8 AM) local time. The 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment was held as the corps reserve, and used after the war as a peacekeeping and humanitarian aid force.
JACK RYAN ENTERRPRISES. LTD., BY LAURA ALPHER
141516 Following the war, VII Corps helped to set up the cease-fire program, and enforce the terms of the armistice between the Iraqis and the Coalition Allies. And then they went home to Germany—and, sadly, that meant the end of the line for the VII Corps. By a strange and unlucky twist of fate, many of the people and units that did the most to win the Cold War have had to suffer “deactivation.” With the fall of the Warsaw Pact and Communism, there simply was not a need for two European-based corps. And VII Corps was shut down. Along with it have gone some of the oldest and most distinguished Cold War units. The 11th ACR, for instance. Others, like the 2nd ACR, have been brought home to the United States and reestablished with new missions. For the 2nd, it has meant a move to Fort Polk, Louisiana, where they have taken on the light cavalry and scouting mission for XVIII Airborne Corps. Today, they’ve given up their tanks and Bradleys for HMMWVs, and are waiting for the new XM8 Armored Gun System (AGS).
As for General Franks, he left VII Corps before most of these events happened. In August of 1991, he was invited by General Gordon Sullivan, the Army Chief of Staff, to command TRADOC. His job there has been to head the intellectual brain trust of the Army, which determines just how it fights, and what it fights with. Today (spring 1994), he still heads TRADOC and all of its bases and personnel resources:
For more than three decades, General Fred Franks has led soldiers in the U.S. Army. If you ask those soldiers about him, you will find an intense respect and affection for this quiet, soft-spoken man of iron will. In his decades of service to the nation, he and the Army he loves have faced many challenges. Fred Franks helped that Army adapt to the lessons learned from Vietnam, and to break free from the Cold War focus at the dawn of a new era. Whether he has been staring down Communist oppressors on the Iron Curtain, or leading troops to liberate the Kingdom of Kuwait, Fred Franks epitomizes the spirit of the cavalry. And that spirit reaches out to touch every soldier in the nation.
U.S. Army Vehicule Systems
Anyone who regularly watches the network news can tell you that the equipment the U.S. Army buys and uses stinks. Investigative reporters have spent years telling the world that the Army’s weapons can’t shoot straight, or that they blow up or fall apart before anyone can use them.
For a more balanced assessment of this hardware, you might ask the Iraqi Army. Saddam’s troops learned the hard way that most media commentators don’t know much about military equipment. In January and February 1991, every major weapons system in the Army got a thorough workout under extreme conditions. Despite all the critics who predicted that our fragile, over-complicated, “hi-tech” weapons would choke on the desert dust of Iraq and Kuwait and fall victim to the Iraqi Army’s “simple” Soviet-designed weapons, the exact opposite occurred.
In less than one hundred hours, the forces of the United States and our Coalition Allies totally defeated a force that had almost six months to dig in. And American weapons were the stars of the show. AH-64A Apache helicopters scored the first hits of the war on the night of January 16th, 1991, taking out a big chunk of Saddam’s air-defense network. M1A1 Abrams tanks were regularly shooting up late-model Soviet T-72 tanks at ranges approaching two miles. Whenever an Iraqi field artillery unit was foolish enough to open fire, within seconds, a hail of cluster bomblets from MLRS artillery rockets would rain down death on them. Such was the level of violence heaped upon the retreating Iraqi forces that the war was terminated after only four days.
How did the Army develop and purchase the equipment it uses today? Buried under the skins of all the vehicles, guns, and aircraft that the Army bought in the 1970s and 1980s was more than just a desire to throw technology and money at the modern battlefield. The threat during those years was massive sudden assault by the forces of the old Warsaw Pact or the North Koreans. What drove the development of these systems was a desire to dominate the battlefield, defeat the enemy army, and throw it back where it came from. This desire was first embodied in the ideas of General Creighton Abrams, the Army Chief of Staff from 1972 to 1974. General Abrams recognized that to win the battles we might be forced to fight in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the ground forces of the United States and our allies would have to fight a new kind of war. This would require the Army to acquire a new generation of weapons, man them with a new all-volunteer force of soldiers, and operate with new tactics that did not even exist in the minds of planners in the early 1970s.
It is an unfortunate truth that the process of building new weapons in the American military takes time. A lot of it. An instructor at the Defense Management School at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, once likened a Department of Defense (DoD) acquisition program to a cattle drive. Each program element is like a steer, with its own mind and goals. The job of the program manager, usually a colonel or brigadier general, is to be the “trail boss”—the man responsible for putting the new weapon or system into the hands of soldiers. Program management is a thankless job. It takes some of the best officers away from their front-line units and places them in offices, where they have to fight a completely different kind of war from what they were trained for. They are scrutinized by obnoxious journalists, overzealous legislators and their staffs, and pushy contractors desperately trying to hold on to their share of the defense budget. This is not the career a true warrior might desire.
But without a strong management team, no program will ever deliver a system to a combat unit. All it takes to make Army program managers shake in their shoes is the memory of the Sergeant York gun system in the 1980s. Originally called the Divisional Air Defense System (DIVADS), it was designed to accompany armored forces to shoot down attack helicopters and aircraft. The DIVADS program had problems from the start. Poorly written specifications required a mismatched collection of off-the-shelf components. The chassis was reworked from the obsolete M48 tank, the old reliable Bofors twin 40mm cannon was shackled to a mechanical loading system that was a rat’s nest of complexity, the radar was adapted from the F-16 fighter, and a digital data bus linked sixteen different microprocessors in various “black boxes” packed inside the turret. Meanwhile, a severely compressed schedule meant that the hardware and software never had time to mature. And if these internal problems weren’t enough, a storm of bad publicity undermined the program. The Sergeant York never recovered from all its troubles, and eventually it was canceled. Most of the fifty-odd vehicles that Ford Aerospace delivered to the Army eventually wound up as targets on Air Force practice ranges. After spending several hundred million dollars to obtain precisely nothing, the Army learned some hard lessons in program management, with reduction of technical risks as a hallmark.
The payoff is a force that is acknowledged as the best equipped in the world. As if that is not enough, the current Army Chief of Staff, General Gordon Sullivan, has planned a series of updates to existing systems, as well as acquisition of a few new ones as “force multipliers” (which is Army talk meaning “anything that increases the effectiveness of what we already have”). Some are relatively small initiatives, like equipping the Army’s fleet of vehicles and aircraft with the NAVSTAR Global Positioning System (GPS) to make navigation more
accurate. Others, like the new RAH-66 Comanche scout/attack helicopter, will require a substantial expenditure to give ground forces a better look at what is over the next hill.
The equipment used by the U.S. Army does not just happen; it takes major investments of taxpayer dollars and Army personnel. After seeing what is out there, you can judge for yourself whether we have gotten our money’s worth.
U.S. Army Armored Vehicles
“Mud Bellys” and “Creepy Crawlers” are just a couple of the names that members of other services use to describe the vehicles used by the U.S. Army. They can call them what they like. Army ground vehicles are today the most capable, mobile, reliable, and robust in the history of motorized warfare. The root of this success is a surprisingly simple thing: a common automotive specification for every vehicle produced for Army service. Each and every tank, armored fighting vehicle, and truck has to be able to climb the same slope (a 60% grade), cross the same types of transverse inclines (up to 45°), ford the same depths of water (approximately 3 feet/1 meter), and meet all the same climatic, safety, maintainability, and other specifications. Operation Desert Storm proved that the Army can now move any combination of its primary vehicles across virtually any navigable terrain, without any one type holding up the advance.
This achievement is due to concerted, long-term efforts of the U.S. Army Tank and Automotive Command (TACOM). Located in Warren, Michigan, it is the heart of the Army’s efforts to modernize its ground vehicles. Despite the common perception that agencies like TACOM are filled with overpaid armchair generals and corrupt political bureaucrats, nothing could be further from the truth. TACOM is a mix of seasoned civilian specialists, ambitious junior officers, and senior staff officers who take the Army’s field experience and turn it into the reality of steel, aluminum, rubber, and plastic. The people of TACOM are driven professionals. The crown jewels of their efforts are tanks and armored fighting vehicles. Let’s look at these first.
The M1 Abrams Main Battle Tank
It has a number of nicknames. U.S. troops call it “The Beast,” “Dracula,” and “Whispering Death.” Whatever name you use, the M1 Abrams is unquestionably the world’s best main battle tank (MBT). To understand why, consider a couple of incidents out of Desert Storm. On one occasion, an M1 fired its 120mm gun at an Iraqi T-72 tank. The round went right through the T-72 and into another one directly behind it, destroying both tanks.
Another more amazing M1 story happened during General Barry McCaffrey’s 24th Mechanized Infantry Division’s run to the Euphrates River. It was raining heavily, and one M 1 managed to get stuck in a mud hole and could not be extracted. With the rest of their unit moving on, the crew of the stuck tank waited for a recovery vehicle to pull them out.
Suddenly, as they were waiting, three Iraqi T-72 tanks came over a hill and charged the mud-bogged tank. One T-72 fired a high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) round that hit the frontal turret armor of the M1, but did no damage. At this point, the crew of the M1, though still stuck, fired a 120mm armor-piercing round at the attacking tank. The round penetrated the T-72’s turret, blowing it off into the air. By this time, the second T-72 also fired a HEAT round at the M1. That also hit the front of the turret, and did no damage. The M1 immediately dispatched this T-72 with another 120mm round. After that, the third and now last T-72 fired a 125mm armor-piercing round at the M1 from a range of 400 meters. This only grooved the front armor plate. Seeing that continued action did not have much of a future, the crew of the last T-72 decided to run for cover. Spying a nearby sand berm, the Iraqis darted behind it, thinking they would be safe there. Back in the M1, the crew saw through their Thermal Imaging Sight (TIS) the hot plume of the T-72’s engine exhaust spewing up from behind the berm. Aiming carefully through the TIS, the M1’s crew fired a third 120mm round through the berm, into the tank, destroying it.
By this time, as you might imagine, the crewmen of the M 1 were getting extremely agitated and making this fact known to anyone who would listen over the radio net. Help in the form of another M1-equipped unit arrived shortly afterwards, and they began trying to extract the stuck M1 from the mud hole. Unfortunately, the Abrams was really and truly stuck. And despite the efforts of two M88 tank-recovery vehicles, the tank would not come loose. Ordered to abandon the stuck Abrams, the other M1s began to fire their own 120mm guns in an attempt to destroy it. The first two rounds failed to penetrate the armor of the mud-bound tank. When a third round was fired from a favorable angle, it finally penetrated the outer skin of the turret, causing the stored ammunition to detonate. But rather than destroying the M1, the blast was vented upwards through a blowout panel, and the onboard fire-suppression system snuffed out the fire before it could do any real damage to the electronic systems in the crew compartment.
By this time, further M88 recovery vehicles arrived. And along with the two earlier M88s, they finally managed to pull the tank out of the mud. Upon examination, the M 1 was found to be operational, with only the sights out of alignment from the blast of the ammunition cooking off. The M 1 was taken back to the divisional repair yard, where the damaged turret was removed (and sent back to the United States for analysis) and replaced, and the tank returned to action.
The M1 was born out of failed efforts to build a new main battle tank (MBT) to replace the M48/60 Patton-series tanks that were the mainstay of the Army’s armored force in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s. This series of tanks, which traced their lineage and basic design to the M26 Pershing of World War II, suffered severe losses in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War (see the opening chapter of my novel The Sum of All Fears) to wire-guided anti-tank missiles and the hordes of Soviet-built tanks that the Egyptians and Syrians threw at them. Though the Israelis won these battles in the end, the cost in tanks and their highly trained crews was far too high for comfort. Concern over the vulnerability of tanks to new man-portable anti-tank missiles (like the AT-3 Sagger) led some military analysts to question the survivability of armored vehicles on a modern battlefield.
Amid all this technical and tactical doubt, the Army was trying desperately to field a new MBT. This effort started in a partnership with the West Germans to field a common tank for use by NATO. This MBT-70 (later renamed by the U.S. Army as the XM803) was a marvel of mechanical engineering. It had a “kneeling” suspension, to present a smaller target when stopped, and a combined missile/gun weapons system which theoretically allowed it to engage and outrun anything on the battlefield. But the MBT-70 was just too complex and costly to make it into service. And in 1971, Congress and the Army killed the program and started over. The West Germans, meanwhile, went on to develop the successful, conventional Leopard II tank on their own, without the MBT-70’s fancy gimmicks.
After the failure of the MBT-70 program, the Army went back to the drawing board with a new program, designated XM1, and a “clean sheet of paper.” The first decision was that XM 1 s would be armed only with guns. Field experience with combined gun/missile systems on tanks had soured the Army on the idea; the shock of firing the gun tended to break delicate electronic and optical systems required by the missile system. But these guns would have the latest laser range-finding and fire-control systems, which meant that the main gun could be aimed more accurately than any tank weapon in history. At the same time, a thermal-imaging sight for the tank commander and the gunner would allow them to see targets at night, or through fog and dust, from their infrared (heat) signature. The new tank would also carry the new-generation Chobham armor, to defeat the anti-tank missiles which had proven so deadly during the ’73 Arab-Israeli War. And finally, extreme high mobility became a key design point for the first time in decades.
The Army gave contracts to General Motors and Chrysler to build prototypes for competitive trials. (The Chrysler tank division was later bought by General Dynamics Corporation.) The GM vehicle was powered by a conventional turbocharged diesel engine, while the Chrysler entry had a revolutionary 1,500-horsepower Avco-Lycoming AGT-1500 gas turbine (a jet engine harnessed
to a drive shaft). Despite considerable pressure from the Army, Congress, and the Germans (who were trying to sell their Leopard II to the Americans), the Chrysler entry was selected by DoD and became the XM1. After development and testing, it was type-classified and given the official name of Abrams, after General Creighton Abrams, who had seen it through its tough gestation period. The very first M1 delivered to the Army was named “Thunderbolt,” the name of General Abrams’ command tank during World War II.
The choice of a 1,500-horsepower turbine power plant was a calculated risk for the DoD team that selected it over the diesel engine in the GM design. Gas-turbine engines present some tough design challenges in automotive applications. First, across a range of throttle settings, gas turbines tend to consume more fuel than an equivalent diesel or gasoline engine. This is particularly noticeable when the M1 is at idle or making a slow road march. On the other hand, the turbine in the M 1 becomes more efficient, better in fact than any other kind of engine, at high cross-country speeds (say 30 to 40 mph/50 to 65 kph). Another problem is that turbines gulp huge amounts of air. And they need extremely efficient air cleaners to filter out dust and particulates that could erode or destroy the costly turbine blades and other components, while the big exhaust plume of hot gas is hazardous to bystanders and highly visible to infrared sensors. These drawbacks were understood and accepted at TACOM when the Chrysler design was selected to go into production. But the payoff for use of the turbine power plant is that the crew of the M 1 has 1,500 horsepower on tap to carry them across the battlefield at something over 40 mph/65 kph. This mobility was the key to the M1s’ performance during the Gulf War, and is one of the reasons that M1 crews love their mounts so very much.
Early M1s carried a 105mm main gun. This weapon, the M68 (based on the British L5), had been the standard U.S. heavy tank gun since the late 1960s. While the gun itself might have been somewhat outdated, the ammunition it fired was completely new. By the 1980s a new generation of long-rod penetrators had been developed for use by the NATO allies. Made of depleted uranium (called “Staballoy” by the U.S. Government), which is extremely dense, these new rounds could punch through the front armor of any tank in the Warsaw Pact. The use of depleted uranium (or DU) helps the long-rods to maximize their energy and maintain a high speed during the flight to the target. In addition to the 105mm gun, the early M1s also carried an M2 .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the commander’s station, an M240 7.62mm machine gun mounted over the loader’s hatch, and a 7.62mm machine gun coaxial to the main gun. Protecting the turret was the new Chobham armor, as well as a number of other innovations, such as an automatic fire-detection/suppression system. The driver sat at the front of the hull in a reclined position (his seat is much like the one in an F-16 fighter), with a motorcycle-style steering/throttle grip.