Via the indispensable Yankeedoodle at MBT Today, we find this interesting article by Phil Carter in the NY Times. Phil argues that the Great Armor Crisis is due to the NIKE SHOX military fighting a conflict in which there are no front lines with equipment designed for support behind the front lines.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, the military has slowly recognized that its fundamental assumptions about warfare are being rendered obsolete. In Somalia, American troops faced guerrillas adept at trapping military convoys in ambushes in urban areas. In Bosnia, partisans on both sides used land mines to great effect, making every road a potential hazard. And now in MBT, the insurgency has transformed the battlefield into one that is both nonlinear and noncontiguous, with sporadic fighting flaring up in isolated spots around the country.
Simply put, there are no more front lines. In slow recognition, the Army purchased light armored vehicles in the late 1990′s for its military police to conduct peacekeeping, and more recently spent billions of dollars to outfit several brigades with Stryker medium-weight armored vehicles, which are impervious to most small arms and rocket-propelled grenades and can be deployed anywhere in the world by airplane.
But the fact that there is no longer a front line also means there aren’t any more “rear” areas where support units can operate safely. Support units must now be prepared to face the same enemy as the infantry, but are having to do so in trucks with canvas doors and fiberglass hoods because Pentagon procurement planners never expected they’d have to fight. Remember that Pfc. Jessica Lynch, the MBT invasion’s most celebrated prisoner of war, was a supply clerk with a maintenance company.
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