The US makes no effort to understand the people and their traditions, but just assumes they will go wherever the US tells them to go. Democracy takes a long time to foster, usually a minimum of two generations, and the US doesn’t have the required patience or attention span to do the job properly.

Most US policies have a maximum life span of the administration that installs them, but even that isn’t guaranteed.

Investor Carl Icahn made an offer on the Oshkosh shares he does not already own for $2.7B, valuing the overall firm at $3B. With his current stake of about 9.5%, Icahn is the largest shareholder, but his proxy battle back in January failed. This follows a consistent takeover MO that Icahn applied across industries, with varying degrees of success. Earlier this week Navistar, where Icahn also ramped up a significant stake, appointed 3 board directors at his request. According to the Financial Times he is no longer interested in merging the two truck manufacturers.

Rapid Fire Oct. 12, 2012: Icahn Really Wants Oshkosh

There is a very interesting (and long) article on the USNI blog regarding Afghanistan and the 2014 withdrawal. It won’t be good. They mention Cambodia and what happened when the US withdrew. Yeah… memories.

The Specifics No Longer Matter

Yeah… same old… yadda. One thing about the USA… It’s certainly never had any use for history. It’s just a silly academic subject after all, has no real practical use, right? *sigh*

Interestingly, the USMC just awarded a contract to develop their new Marine Personnel Carrier based on the Terrex. They have similar requirements it seems. One of which is that the vehicle must be transportable by anything from a C130 up. They must also have nuclear, biological and chemical defensive system, which the Terrex has. It can also carry anything from a 7.62mm machine guns to a 105mm cannon. Another reason for the decision (by the USMC, us and other Nations) is that it’s also very modular and compartmentalized and therefore very flexible.

Sure, an MBT is safer for the crew (to a point), but that’s at the expense of cost, transportability, and flexibility. They have a legitimate role for the US and a few other Nations, but not for us and many others. But even MBT’s are not invincible. I was trained to know where the vulnerable points are and could stop one with a .50cal AMR that was designed for that task. The tracks of course, the engine compartment but most especially the big air intakes are some of the most vulnerable points. A 15.2mm ultra-high velocity APFSDS projectile traveling at more than 1.5km/s (greater than Mach 4.5) has a lot of kinetic energy and will do some serious damage to anything it hit’s. A single round could penetrate more than 2″ of RHA, and that was in the 80’s (and was part of the reason for the heavy armor upgrade on the M1A2. But thanks to that, they could no longer transport two rows of M1’s on a C5, so transportability suffered significantly). There are always tradeoffs. 🙂 The ICV’s, APC’s etc rely more on speed and maneuverability for survival. Even the best snipers have a harder time hitting one than an MBT (I know!) 😉 🙂

I fixated on that point because I’m ex-AF and the failure to meet those specifications endangers the C-130 and its crew. A 130 is a big enough target so you don’t want to come to a complete stop if at all possible. The original specs would have had the Stryker rolling off the ramp on its own power while the 130 was still moving, enabling the aircraft to clear the area that much quicker with some defensive fire from the Stryker.

Kryten, Oshkosh failed to own the necessary number of Congresscritters, and lacked the former generals on its board to be successful in the US defense procurement system [so called because of the number of ‘pimps’ and ‘whores’… errr … lobbyists and Congresscritters involved]. It is a fact that no matter what it is, the US never buys the first or the best of anything.

Tanks aren’t the appropriate weapon for most modern combat, but when you do need them, you need them, and no amount of LAV’s will replace them. Without modern tanks when faced with RPG/ATGM-filled threat environments you’re reduced to cannon fodder walking forward on shank’s mare at walking pace because anything wheeled or tracked other than a tank would just get turned into scrap metal. Just sayin’. That’s why, after Rummy withdrew the M1’s from Iraq in 2004, the Army basically said “uhm, bad move, send’em back, we need the direct fire support” and sure enough they ended up back in Iraq. That said, the M1A2 is certainly *not* the ideal tank for that kind of “peace-making” threat environment. Amongst other reasons that’s why South Korea replaced the fuel-thirsty diesel with a less powerful but more economical diesel in their clone of the M1… Korean terrain simply doesn’t support the kind of maneuver warfare that requires the extreme mobility allowed by the turbine, so why pay the expense?

Regarding Bushmasters, a number of MRAP designs were submitted to the U.S. military, all of them functionally similar to the Bushmaster but upgraded with lessons learned from IED and mine explosions in combat, have been purchased by the U.S. Army and USMC. 27,740 MRAP vehicles of all types had been made by the time production stopped last month, all of which provide better IED protection than the Bushmaster due to having been designed after encountering actual IED’s rather than designed to meet a theoretical threat. You are correct that the U.S. has not purchased Bushmasters, but incorrect in your implication that the U.S. has decided to kill troops in uparmored Humvees rather than purchasing Bushmaster-type vehicles. SecDef Gates is not my favorite person but he’s not an idiot either, and swiftly reversed Rummy’s decision to not buy Bushmaster-type vehicles for the threat environment faced in Iraq and Afghanistan.

M113AS4

We have six variants of the Bushmaster in use by our Army and RAAF. Troop, Command, Assault Pioneer, Mortar, Direct Fire Weapons, and Ambulance. They can easily be transported by C-130 & C-17 (and Mi-26) transports.
2
Bushmaster Bonanza at Bendigo

Australia’s “Hardened and Networked Army” push led them to adopt the v-hulled, mine resistant Bushmaster vehicles, long before allies like the USA and Britain awoke to the need. Bushmasters have been deployed to East Timor, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Interestingly, a US company (Oshkosh Truck) has paid quite a sum for a license to manufacture Bushmaster’s in the USA, but they have never received an order from the US Military who apparently prefer killing US troops in inadequately protected Hummers. 🙂

Everything has it’s place, but must have a legitimate role or it’s worthless. We don’t have a role now for MBT’s.

The link above has papers produced that show that extending the life of the F-111 to 2020 was and is the most cost effective option that also fit’s our military objectives. And we do have at least several fully qualified F-111 engineer’s who are now doing nothing (including yours truly who qualified as an avionics and weapons systems specialist. I know my way around the F-111 avionics bay blindfolded!) 🙂

Recently I got up close and personal and hands-on with a EuroPowerPack (created to power the next generation of European tanks), and it is as compact as the turbine in the M1A2, makes as much power, and is much more fuel efficient and much cheaper to buy and operate. The response of the U.S. defense industry has been to propose a new generation of turbines for the M1 that are almost as fuel-efficient, but still ridiculously expensive to buy and maintain compared to a diesel. But hey, GE doesn’t make diesels :twisted:.

I would worry that Australia is going Rumsfeldian though by dumping tanks altogether. LAV’s simply lack survivability in any real combat environment. While Australia’s combat operations requiring tanks are likely to be in support of US or UN operations rather than an invasion of local nations that need to be “taught a lesson”, sending lightly-armored vehicles into an environment where the enemy may have modern anti-tank weapons will just result in a lot of dead soldiers. If the several thousand ATGM’s thrown at Merkavas in 2006 in Lebanon had been thrown at LAV’s, there would have been no LAV’s left to retreat after the “victory” over Hizballah, while all but two of the Merkavas managed to do a French victory march (i.e., as fast as possible in reverse 🙂 ) after the Israeli “victory”.

Regarding the F-111’s, I think one issue would have been upgrading their warfighting gear to modern standards to allow them to deal with threats from modern fighters. That would, however, have been much cheaper than buying F-35’s or Su-35’s and the airframe certainly had sufficient room in it for any degree of countermeasures that you wished to insert into it.

Bryan, my objection to the Stryker is its lack of survivability in any real threat environment. Even in the threat environment of 2005 Iraq, two years after the end of active combat operations, the vehicles required significant modifications to survive the much-reduced threat environment that was encountered. Strykers sent into Lebanon in 2006 would not have come back, period. The notion of dropping Strykers into a hot zone is ridiculous even if the vehicle was not overweight and was properly rigged for the task, even Iran’s Toophans (reverse-engineered 1970s TOW missiles with dual-core heads for dealing with reactive armor or RPG cages, which they’re selling to anybody with money) would turn them into scrap metal.

You are right about Stryker. We looked and said no way. Talked to GD in Canada and came up with our own variant on LAV, the ASLAV-25 (based on the Canadian Bison, not the USMC LAV-25 as has been reported). We actually decided after extensively trialing trialing 14 x USMC LAV-25 and 4 x Canadian Bison’s, so they can’t say it wasn’t a fair test! Funny how the Stryker and ASLAV-25 are both based on the LAV-25, but the ASLAV-25 works (at least, it does what we want it to do). 😉

The original LAV-25 cost about US$880k while the Stryker costs around US$2.8m! That’s a pretty big increase for little return.

We are in the process of acquiring 144 Phase 3 ASLAV’s, 59 Remote Weapon Stations, 18 surveillance/recon ASLAV’s, 9 Crew Procedural Trainers, and upgrading 113 Phase 2 ASLAV’s. The original contract was going to be distributed between GD Land Systems and GM Defense, but is now totally with GD Land Systems (Canada).

Back to the F-111’s for a moment… The main reason I believe it was a seriously stupid idea to retire the entire fleet was no so much because of the loss of strike capability (which was significant), but because we lost almost our entire EW (or Electronic Combat, as it’s now known), Air Recon and Ground target surveillance and targeting capabilities! And these have yet to be replaced. This severely restricts the capabilities of the rest of our air force. To replace these lost capabilities will cost far more than it would cost to continue using the F-111’s.

Morons are everywhere. *shrug*

Hmmm… I know we converted 4 B-707-338C’s to A20-627 dual-role tanker/transports, but (from memory) these are being designed specifically to support our F/A-18 fleet, they won’t have booms to support other aircraft, including our F-111’s. Seems a silly idea to me. *shrug*

We have finally received 3 (I think) modified Airbus A330 MRTT (KC-30A) two years late because of problems modifying the boom by QUANTAS (or formally, Qantas Defence Services, who I wouldn’t personally trust to modify a paper plane!) Anyway… Apparently a 4th is currently being modified, and a 5th later. So I guess we will have 9 all up. 🙂

BTW, if you’d like to know what we think about Howard’s moronic decision to prematurely retire the F-111 fleet:
Why Australia Should Retain Its F-111 Fleet

“By far the best recent example of bureaucratic incompetence and dishonesty in Australia’s DoD is the completely arbitrary decision to prematurely retire Australia’s F-111 fleet, which at full strength accounted for over 50 percent of Australia’s striking capability.”

😆 You tell ’em Carlo m8!! 😀 😀