Re: DSII/SGII-related question: fighting vehicles

--- "K.H.Ranitzsch" <KH.Ranitzsch@t-online.de> wrote:

> This latter part is primarily US army logic. A lot
> of other armies
> (Bundeswehr, British, French, Russian) prefer to
> have specific recce/cavalry
> vehicles which are optimised for the role: smaller
> (less visible), faster,
> quieter etc. than the IFV-derivative, which has to
> be big enough to hold the
> full infantry crew in its other role.

US Army used to do this as well (WWII recon units were
mostly jeeps and armored cars, with a handful of light
tanks and half-tracks backing them up, like Whermacht
recon units, albeit with less firepower in the armored
cars).	However, we missed a modernization cycle in
the 1960s/early 70s due to the Vietnam War.  As a
result there was no time for a leisurely (read:
well-considered) weapons modernization program that
got proper equipment for each role, spaced out over a
larger period of time.	A conference of senior
officers in the late 70s got together and determined
what the minimum modernization package they _had_ to
sell Congress was in order to restore combat
capability to US Army.	They combined the roles of the
IFV and CFV because they didn't think they could get
seperate vehicles past Congress and didn't want to
hold up the program over what they felt was a
secondary consideration.  That's why the Corps of
Engineers pretty much missed out on that modernization
cycle and are still using more or less the same
equipment (plus the ACE, which was bought
off-the-shelf) our fathers drove in Vietnam.  The "Big
Five" systems were the M-1, the M-2/-3, the Apache,
the Blackhawk, and the MLRS.

John

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