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Army modifies equipment to keep up with conditions in Iraq

March 6th, 2007 by Double Tap

It looks like Iraq’s urban fighting is beginning to drive the Army procurement thinking process, much more than a potential fight with a conventional army (like, say, China). Click on the picture to see some of the modifications the Army is making to enhance the close-quarters fighting capability of the M1 Abrams.
I already thought that Rumsfield’s FCS program was too focused on light fighting and small-scale wars. Now, the Army is beginning to think even that program is too heavy for the fighting we are conducting right now.
MG Nadeau, who is in charge of the Army’s research and development command, asks the question, “If (FCS) were here in its entirety today, how would the soldier’s life in that city be better? If we can’t answer that, we’re probably going down the wrong path and we need to make modifications.”

I tend to take the long view on this. Yes, we need to have equipment tailored to the fight we are in. But this fight isn’t going to last forever, and who is the next potential enemy? If we are talking about nation-states, then we are talking about conventional armies of some sort of flavor.

OIF started off as a full-scale conventional war. Tanks were fighting tanks, bombers were bombing armor formations. We completely leveled the Iraqi conventional army, but that’s because we had far superior tanks and bombers and soldiers. The next fight we have with a country (Iran, Syria, China, North Korea, you name it) will assuredly start off conventional. Iraq taught us that we have to be prepared for the follow-on insurgency, but it also taught us we have to destroy the conventional army first.

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