12 November 2012
Like Canada, the United States is in the throes of
developing a new armoured combat vehicle for ferrying troops around the
battlefield. Canada calls them Close
Combat Vehicles, while the Americans call them Ground Combat Vehicles. The future of the army does not look bright.
Recently, the two companies competing for the new supply
contract released estimates of the weight of their entry for replacement of the
M2 Bradley. Either one will be heavier
than the M1-A1 Abrams tank.
The General Dynamics design calls for a weight of between 64
and 70 tons, depending upon the armour package.
The BAE proposal calls for a weight of between 70 to 84 tons. The M1-A1 Abrams tanks weighs in at between
60 and 75.5 tons.
Though the new GCV designs call for carrying nine troops, as
compared to six in the M2 Bradley, the Bradley weighs in at only 30 tons.
What this means, and foretells, is that the protection of
infantry troops in future combat is getting out of hand. These numbers are signs that the political
cost of casualties is driving the financial cost of future wars out of sight,
even for the United States.
Wars over the next thirty years that would involve western
troops are seen as being re-runs of Iraq and Afghanistan by the planners. In these wars, the overthrow of a weak regime
is followed by a long occupation of the country as modern, (read: western
style) governments are put into place and given time to take root. While this is going on, reactionary movements
come into being and somehow find the weapons and explosives to inflict
casualties upon the western troops.
Heavier armour for everything has thus far been the answer.
The great German Chancellor of the 19th Century,
Otto von Bismark, once said of the Balkans that they were not worth the bones
of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Modern
western democracies hold much the same attitude towards non-western countries
that are insistently backward and culturally obtuse. To name names would be superfluous and take
up too much space.
Taking casualties for the sake of democracy in Iraq and
Afghanistan proved politically acceptable until the size of the resistance and
the qualities of the regimes supported became clearer.
As casualties mounted, all sorts of expensive new vehicles
were developed and rushed to the theatres of Iraq and Afghanistan to counter
the threat of cheap Improvised Explosive Devices.
The cost of keeping western troops from being wounded or
killed in IED attacks is getting so high, it calls into question the worth of
sending in an expeditionary force to bring the sweetness and light of western
democracy to non-western countries.
It is not as though there is a cultural vacuum in these
countries that western culture fills. On
the contrary, these countries possess a very old culture, one that just happens
to hold them back relative to the west, and western culture would displace some
of it.
The Judeo-Christian ethic and Hellenic reasoning that
undergirds western culture is hostile to the underpinnings of this old culture. Consequently, it is quite unlikely that in
any period of occupation western countries would consider reasonable, the
political fruits of western culture will take firm root in these old soils. And trying to force it to take root spawns
these resistance movements that kill our soldiers.
Political idealism must yield to the realities of
costs. It simply costs too much money
and too much blood to bring the backward portions of humanity into a condition
the western world would regard as reasonable.
The threat of terrorism and the threat of nuclear
proliferation that these otherwise backward countries pose to the western world
remains, however. What can be done
militarily to neutralize these threats?
Since military occupation is no longer an economically
feasible means of reducing or controlling the threat, a large land force is not
a major part of the solution to this problem.
If invading a foreign land, destroying its armed forces,
occupying it’s capital and large portions of its countryside, and imposing a
regime that western bayonets support is not sufficient as a means of putting
down terrorism, then some other means must be found.
Whatever this means turns out to be, we know what it is not:
a large, mobile army with overly armoured troop carriers, tanks that are used
as IED triggering devices, and troops that wear 60 lbs of armour as basic
kit. If Iraq and Afghanistan represent
the wars of the future, the army will be substantially out of work.
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XXX –
A version of this was published in Esprit de Corps Magazine
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