By Marina Malenic
The first hints of what a new Army combat vehicle might look like emerged last week when the service’s chief of staff said he expects a medium-weight platform versatile enough to be employed in both irregular and conventional battles.
Gen. George Casey told Defense Daily that he envisions the new vehicle as, first and foremost, a replacement for the M2/M3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles.
“We need to replace the Bradley,” Casey said, following a May 28 speech at the Atlantic Council. “The Bradley is limited in size, weight and power.”
Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates terminated the $87 billion Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV) portion of the Army’s $150 billion modernization program, the Future Combat Systems (FCS). Gates said the kind of irregular combat that emerged over the years in Iraq and Afghanistan had made the existing vehicle designs obsolete. The MGVs would have had soldiers rely on a computer network for improved awareness of incoming attacks that they could in turn counteract, rather than providing heavy armor protection against explosives.
Instead, Gates directed the Army to devise a plan for a new combat vehicle that better incorporates elements of irregular warfare, such as a V-shaped hull designed to protect against improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Casey said the Army was doing just that while also keeping in mind the need to fight in a variety of scenarios. He said he wants a vehicle that is “versatile enough for the whole spectrum [of warfare], rather than one optimized for one point on the spectrum.” At the same time, he added, the new vehicle could weigh in somewhere below the Bradley’s approximately 25 tons.
“I’d like it to be a mid-weight, but you’ve got to have enough weight in an IED environment to protect the people inside,” said Casey. “I’d like it to be a little lighter than a Bradley, but we’re not certain if that’s feasible.”
Earlier that evening, Casey told another audience in Washington that the Bradley and the M1A1/2 Abrams main battle tank “will be the dominant fighting vehicles in their categories for… another decade or so.” However, the general added, “we’re moving toward what I would call a more middleweight force.”
Since the end of the Cold War, the Army has converted 200 tank, artillery and air defense batteries–units designed specifically for conventional warfare–into lighter forces, according to Casey. And this year’s iteration of the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), a major reexamination of the Pentagon’s force posture and weapon systems occurring once every four years, is likely to continue that downsizing trend.
“One of the things we will look at over the QDR is the force mix,” Casey explained in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Do we need as many heavy brigades as we had?…The analogy is, really, a middleweight fighter is agile enough to punch up against heavyweights and can overcome lightweights.”
To prepare for “hybrid” twenty-first century warfare in which hostile state and non-state actors employ an amalgam of conventional and irregular tactics, the Army must now develop a “versatile mix of tailorable organizations,” according to Casey. The service will need some combination of heavy, medium and light units, he said, but even the light infantry will need heavy armor for transport, such as that provided by Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.
“We’ll probably further downsize the heavy force over the next several years and replace it with some middleweight vehicle,” Casey added. “The Secretary [Gates] is committed to the development of a ground combat vehicle to replace the Bradley and, ultimately, the tank.”
There remains an enduring need for tank-type vehicles, even in modern warfare, according to Casey. He said the 2006 conflict between Israel and Hezbollah paramilitary forces in Lebanon and northern Israel exemplified the type of hybrid warfare he expects to dominate the twenty-first century. In that conflict, the Israelis learned that a mix of heavy and light, conventional and special forces were all necessary to defeat a complex enemy, according to Casey.
“The Israelis had been working so much conducting counterinsurgency-like operations in the West Bank that they lost their combined arms skills–the ability to integrate fires and air [strikes] and tanks and artillery,” he said. “If you look at what they just did in Gaza, where they employed combined arms…they were much more successful.
“A lot of people ask, is the heavy force dead?” he added. “No, you see the value of the heavy force in places like Gaza. I saw it firsthand in Najaf and in Fallujah [Iraq]. In urban combat, tanks and Bradleys are very, very effective.”
Further, Casey said the terms conventional warfare and irregular warfare “do not offer a helpful distinction.” He recalled early in his career learning to fight “major tank battles on the plains of Europe.” He joked that the older generation of U.S. Army officers is “genetically ingrained with a Fulda Gap,” while younger soldiers are stereotyped as only being capable of conducting counterinsurgency warfare.
“We must do both,” he said.
What exactly that dichotomy means for the next generation of Army combat vehicles is about to be realized. Casey acknowledged that service leaders are still toying with the idea of reviving an FCS-type “family of vehicles,” which would have yielded eight light-weight combat and auxiliary vehicles, all built on a common chassis. The service’s Training and Doctrine Command is developing specifications for the new vehicle, or vehicles, to be ready as early as this week.
Indeed, the whole project is on a relatively short timeline, with fielding expected within five to seven years. Such an accelerated schedule “ties us to existing technology,” Casey acknowledged. “But that’s OK, because we think we know where the state of the art and technology is for combat vehicles because we pushed that technology with FCS. We will be able to capture that and incorporate it into the new vehicle.”
The general said he expects the Pentagon’s office of acquisition, technology and logistics to release a document officially restructuring the FCS program “in a couple of weeks.” That event will allow the new vehicle program to move forward.
Asked about the cost of the new Army modernization effort, Casey said the vehicle portion “will clearly be the most expensive part of the program” but declined to specify a dollar value for either it or the modernization effort as a whole.
“You can bet we’re not going to come up with another program that’s $150 billion,” he said. “We don’t want to create another easy target.”