XBradTC

LTG McMaster has some thoughts on light infantry, and just how light they should be. Understand, LTG McMaster is an armor guy. He’s not talking so much here about the future of the Abrams/Bradley heavy team, but the Stryker mounted Brigade Combat Teams, and the (currently dismounted) Infantry Brigade Combat Teams.

The strength of dismounted light infantry is that it can go anywhere, particularly close  terrain such as forests, mountains, and urban terrain. The weakness is, they can only do it at about 3 miles per hour.  Moving a unit via foot is terribly slow. Yes, there is the option for helicopter movement, but helicopters are always in short supply, and often quite vulnerable to even primitive air defenses. You could move the unit by truck, but those are generally road bound, and vulnerable to IEDs or other defenses.

Accordingly, LTG McMaster and the Army is looking at buying an off the shelf “Ground Mobility Vehicle” that will allow infantry to move rapidly to its objective, and there dismount and fight as infantry.

There will always be tradeoffs in speed, mobility, protection, firepower and costs. For one thing, if you insist on greater and greater levels of protection, pretty soon you end up with an Abrams. On the other hand, if you go with little or no protection, you wind up with the debacle we saw in Iraq with units forced to cobble together hillbilly armor. Where exactly you strike that balance, I’m not entirely sure.

One other issue with mounting troops on vehicles is that it almost invariably drives down the size of the rifle squad. The manpower constraints on the Army aren’t going away, and vehicles mean assigned drivers and maintenance teams. With a cap on manpower, that’s almost certain to come from the rifle squads. The problem there is, a nine man squad is about as small an effective size you can field.

LTG McMaster also is looking at rearming the current Stryker ICV fleet.

For Stryker brigade combat teams, McMaster said the Army needs to provide additional lethality to vehicles. “We have a Stryker mounted with a World War II weapon,” he said. This means the Army would want half of its Stryker armored personnel carriers to have a 30mm cannon and a machine gun and the other half to be equipped with Javelin anti-tank missiles and a machine gun.

That kind of signals that the Army is not entirely happy with the 105mm armed M1128 Mounted Gun System variant of the Stryker.

My word of caution here though would be that it will become very tempting to fight the Stryker platoon or company like a Bradley unit. But the Stryker simply doesn’t have the armor to be treated like a armored fighting vehicle. Instead, it should be thought of as a truck for a rifle squad that simply happens to be less vulnerable to small arms fire.