by Bill Fawcett
Oops!
A few angry letters to congressmen, several thousand shipped packages of store-bought lubricant, a number of ArmaLite field kit patches and weapons upgrades later, the army stood by the M-16. While some M-14 variants continued to be utilized in limited instances by special operations personnel several decades later, the perfect weapon so carefully crafted over time never saw the large-scale military deployment for which it had been designed. Instead, because of an act of capriciousness and sheer willpower, the M-16 became the flawed twentieth- and twenty-first-century successor to the Second World War M-1 rifle. Instead of their holy grail, the army got a cracked coffee cup.
“Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.”
—Rebecca West
A Heavyweight Too Heavy to Fight
William Terdoslavich
Every new weapons system has to be bigger, faster, better, and more expensive than its predecessor. That is the Pentagon way.
The Crusader XM2001 had many of these attributes. It was an amazing piece of self-propelled artillery—while it lasted. The Crusader’s liquid-cooled 155mm gun could fire ten to twelve rounds a minute at ranges up to thirty-one miles. Its computerized fire control system could key the gun to fire eight rounds at different settings so that the shells arrived on target simultaneously. It could sprint 750 meters to a new firing position to avoid enemy return fire.
And it was going to be a real “bargain.” You could buy 450 of them for only $11 billion. And each Crusader could do the work of several of its predecessors.
Despite all these goodies, the Crusader XM2001 weighed forty tons. The support vehicle carrying the extra ammunition for reloads weighed thirty tons.
And that seventy-ton package weighed heavily on the mind of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the man who lanced the Crusader.
No Fat Artillery Pieces
Necessity conceived the Crusader during the Gulf War of 1990–91. The Army was relying on the M109 Paladin, a 155mm self-propelled artillery piece that started service in 1962 and had seen many upgrades since then. By 1990, the Paladin was outclassed and outranged by more contemporary Soviet artillery, which the Russians sold gladly to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Fortunately U.S. forces did not have to face an enemy firing better guns while kicking the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait, but the Paladin’s performance shortcomings worried defense planners and generals.
The reliable Paladin needed a replacement.
Work on the next gun began in 1994 by United Defense Industries International, a subsidiary of the Carlyle Group. The project was well managed, plugging along on time and on budget throughout the 1990s. Crusader had to be well armored to survive the hazards of the modern battlefield, thus adding to its weight. But two factors conspired to undermine Crusader as it was being turned from a prototype to a weapon. It lacked enthusiastic support in Congress. And the war in Afghanistan, following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, questioned the need for a seventy-ton weapons package that could not be moved easily to distant trouble spots.
The Army was going to kill to get the Crusader.
Donald Rumsfeld wanted to kill the gun just as badly.
The inevitable budget battle was going to be a bloody one.
Lawyers, Guns, and Money
In the spring and summer of 2002, Crusader’s proponents and critics fought over the program’s fate. Defending the program were then Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki and Army Secretary Thomas White. Shinseki was blunt about the Army’s need for the Crusader. Pointing to the war in Afghanistan, the general stressed the need for immediate fire support for troops in the midst of battle. Calling in artillery fire only takes two to three minutes. An air strike can take up to ten times as long, which in combat is like waiting forever.
But the Crusader looked like a fat turkey to Rumsfeld, who complained that 60 to 64 C-17 heavy lift aircraft—half the C-17 fleet—would be needed to move a battalion of 18 Crusaders to the next global hot spot. Each Crusader, fully loaded with fuel and ammo, plus its accompanying support vehicle, would form a transport package weighing 97 tons.
Supporters were quick to point out that the Crusader was never meant to be airlifted. Like much of the Army’s mechanized equipment, Crusader would move by ship or would be prepositioned near possible trouble spots to permit more rapid deployment.
However, even heavy equipment can be airlifted in a pinch. NATO commander Gen. Montgomery Meigs made that point. Practicing a rapid reaction force airlift in Europe, he moved 2,500 troops and 325 vehicles to Hungary to simulate a rapid intervention. Sixty-ton M-1 Abrams tanks rolled off of C-5 Galaxy heavy lift transports, along with other pre-positioned M-2 Bradleys and a plethora of HUMVEEs and trucks that were delivered by heavy lift C-17s and the far more commonplace C-130s.
Even Army General Thomas Keane pointed out that a single Crusader could have been airlifted to Afghanistan in a hurry and driven to the front to support U.S. troops in Operation Anaconda, fighting Al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists near Shahikot.
Rumsfeld then fired back with his heavy gun: Central Command chief General Tommy Franks, who testified before Congress that the single Crusader would not have done much good in Afghanistan anyway.
To counter the Crusader, Rumsfeld stressed the use of Precision Guided Munitions (PGMs) as an alternative. This broad category of weapons encompasses any missile, bomb, or shell that has a guidance system, giving a single round or missile the power to inflict certain death on any target residing at a map coordinate. Why, Rumsfeld argued, use a multi-billion-dollar overweight artillery piece to do the work of a million-dollar smart weapon? His eye was on Excalibur, a light multiple rocket system that could be deployed by a C-130. But Rumsfeld’s vision was questioned by Senator James Inhofe (R-Oklahoma). Why fire a $200,000 missile to hit the same target as a $200 artillery shell?
In the end, the weight of Rumsfeld’s argument was measured in tons, as he argued that the Crusader wasn’t “expeditionary enough.” The proof was the deployment of a Marine Expeditionary Unit to secure an airfield in Afghanistan. To speed the deployment, the Marines left their artillery behind, counting on air support to do the same job as the big guns. Franks chose to deploy the Marine unit because it was made to move quickly rather than wait for the Army to move one of its own battalions.
In the end, Rumsfeld got his way.
He killed the Crusader.
And he caused some collateral damage.
Representative J. C. Watts (R-Oklahoma), the number three Republican in the House leadership (and the only African-American Republican in the House), declined to seek re-election because he could not save the Crusader. It was going to be made in Oklahoma.
Shinseki did not improve his standing with Rumsfeld by defending the Crusader. Shortly before the Iraq War, Shinseki testified before Congress that it would take more than double the estimated 150,000 troops to secure the country.
Rumsfeld, who crusaded for the Iraq War, dismissed this argument—and Shinseki, who got replaced by General Peter Schoomaker.
Army Secretary White was forced to resign in disgrace, but that was over his previous involvement with the bankrupt energy-trading firm Enron.
And the Winner Is…
The program to develop the Crusader had already consumed $2 billion, with the remaining $9 billion “saved.” Crusader’s design and performance concepts were rolled into the artillery piece that will become part of Boeing’s “Future Combat System,” an array of fourteen programs totaling over $160 billion. The concept is to integrate a family of unmanned aerial vehicles mounting sensors with a wireless information network that would provide real-time targeting information to a series of light tanks, APCs (Armored Personnel Carriers), and self-propelled artillery pieces.
The Non-Line of Sight Cannon (NLOS-C) is Crusader’s replacement in the FCS program. It will mount a 155 mm gun with a similar computerized firing and auto-loading system as Crusader, but
only be able to fire six rounds a minute or four rounds for simultaneous impact. The twenty-ton gun is to be carried into hot spots by the C-130, the most common of the Air Force’s transport planes.
The FCS is expected to begin deployment around 2014. Crusader would have gone into service in 2008. But if FCS and the NLOS-C follow the typical path of weapons development, it should arrive late, over budget, unable to work as advertised, and requiring expensive follow-on work to become functional.
That is when the dead Crusader will seem like a bargain.
In 1836, the Creek and Seminole Indian tribes in Georgia and Florida were waging war against the United States. The U.S. Army had its hands full. The 5th Commandant of the Marine Corps offered the services of a regiment of Marines for duty with the Army. Colonel Commandant A. Henderson placed himself in command and, taking virtually the entire available strength of the Corps, left for the extended campaign after tacking a terse message on his office door which read:
Have gone to Florida to fight Indians. Will be back when War is over.
The Double Agent
Paul A. Thomsen
During the Vietnam War, American soldiers faced snipers, saboteurs, formal military forces and a seemingly intractable enemy able to blend into the surrounding Asian countryside. While the United States military bested the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) in every theater battlefield action, the enemy’s ability to rapidly appear, strike, and then, just as rapidly, melt away into the thick growth of the surrounding environment consistently placed the western superpower on the defensive.
As the casualty rate for American ground forces patrolling the jungle countryside soared, American war planners and ground commanders looked to a new weapon, called Agent Orange, to help them find and kill the enemy. Once sprayed across designated areas, the herbicide would destroy all nearby plant life and, hence, enable the American military to find the NVA and drive them from the area. It was a sound plan, but, years later, evidence emerged to show that the agent had worked a little too well.
After the Second World War, France struggled to regain control over her colonial holdings in Southeast Asia, but try as they might, the French were repeatedly humiliated by a rag-tag group of Vietnamese rebels. When France finally withdrew, the United States stepped in, determined to prevent Vietnam from being absorbed by Communist interests. The U.S. filled the void at first with a few hundred advisors, and, later, hundreds of thousands of troops. Like the French, they also faced stiff resistance from the unconventional enemy and their ability to use the environment to camouflage their moves. The heat and humidity played havoc with the technologically superior American weapons. The lush swampy terrain populated the countryside with a myriad of ambush possibilities, and what military units could see on the ground fifty yards away, was frequently hidden from air support by thick foliage and dense tree canopies. It was a green nightmare.
In 1962, in an attempt to stem the tide of American body bags and neutralize the growing communist movement, military leaders enlisted the aid of the relatively new agricultural technology of herbicides, hoping to effect greater control over the Vietnamese countryside and expel the NVA. By agreement with the American defense community, civilian chemical companies were contracted to prepare and package different mixtures of herbicides in white, purple, blue, pink, green, and orange color-coded fifty-gallon drums for the military.
Once the herbicides had been transferred into military care, Vietnamese-based American military units then engaged in an organized large-scale dispersal of the agent throughout the most heavily contested regions in the combat zone. According to estimates, between 1961 and 1975, the military sprayed nearly ten percent of South Vietnam with seventy-two million liters of chemical defoliants by aircraft. An additional six million liters were sprayed in smaller water- and ground-based actions. In little time, the falling clouds of the most widely used herbicide, Agent Orange, ate through much of the green canopy, exposing fields, previously hidden enclaves, and enemy transportation networks to military surveillance and attack units. The frequency of spraying reportedly grew so high that, during Operation Hades and Operation Ranch Hand, one group, the 309th Air Commando Squadron, created a new group motto, “Only We Can Prevent Forests.”
Ironically, the military had narrowly defined their enemy as NVA and Viet-Cong (VC) and had, in removing the enemy, inflicted such hardships on the South Vietnamese populace that much of the south also rose up against the United States. Shortly after the 1975 collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the removal of American forces from Southeast Asia, several returning American military personnel were diagnosed with soft-tissue sarcomas or non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas.
In 1977, the growing ranks of similarly ill veterans pointed to their frequent exposure to the smog-like mists of Agent Orange as the cause of their illness. Few in government and private business gave serious consideration to their claims. As the years went by, still greater numbers of Vietnam veterans reported incidents of illness consistent with their stricken, dying, and now deceased comrades, all of whom had been exposed to Agent Orange. It seemed that the chemical concoction they had been dumping for years had been eating more than just plant life.
In the late 1970s, media outlet exposés on Agent Orange pressed a few members of the United States Congress into addressing the situation, but the efforts of the few were not able to overcome the intractable position of either the military or the involved businesses, who denied any relationship between the illnesses and Agent Orange. Finally, through the combined efforts of the Veterans Administration (VA), increasing interest by intrepid reporters, and several class action cases, the federal government was forced to reevaluate the effects of Agent Orange. After careful study, several scientists and veterans’ lawyers investigating the chemical compounds reached the conclusion that the mixtures were, indeed, linked not only to the defoliated jungles, but also to the ill health of many of the humans exposed to the herbicide.
By 1986, nearly 220,000 Vietnam veterans requested examinations to confirm that their health problems were caused by their exposure to Agent Orange fifteen to twenty years prior. Facing staggering numbers of claimants filing suit and mounting evidence, the civilian companies which had provided the herbicide ultimately settled out of court with the American veterans for tens of millions of dollars provided by the government and the promise of continued medical assistance. Several decades after the American military evacuation of South Vietnam, names continue to be added to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., silent testament to imperial folly and a victims list of America’s most insidious double agent.
“If we slide into one of those rare moments of military honesty, we realize that the technical demands of modern warfare are so complex a considerable percentage of our material is bound to malfunction even before it is deployed against a foe. We no longer waste manpower by carrying the flag into battle. Instead we need battalions of electronic engineers to keep the terrible machinery grinding.”
—Ernest K. Gann, The Black Watch
Sergeant York Misses the Target
William Terdoslavich
It can take years to develop a new weapons system.
It can take months to prove it does not work.
It can take days to kill it.
It can take a minute to roll your eyes in disgust.
The M247 Sergeant York went through all those phases of inept development. The Army needed an anti-aircraft gun for divisional air defense (hence the acronym DIVAD). And they wanted one in a hurry. But the shortcuts taken to meet the need turned into coffin nails that sealed the fate of a good idea badly executed.
Back in the late 1970s, the Army’s Vulcan 20mm anti-aircraft gun was getting long in the tooth. The Chaparral anti-aircraft missiles were also aging badly. The Army needed something for low-altitude air defense, especially at a time when the Soviets were fielding new fighter and ground attack aircraft that could easily overcome existing anti-aircraft systems.
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p; In the interest of speed, the Army specified only off-the-shelf components of proven performance would be used for the project. The Army was also going to leave it to the contractors to pull the system together with minimal oversight for a fixed price. They hoped the recipe would yield a useable anti-aircraft gun in only a few years—before rising costs robbed the program of its value.
The result was the Sergeant York self-propelled anti-aircraft gun, which unlike its namesake, could not hit anything. As one press critic put it, the Sergeant York “died of embarrassment.” As author Andrew Cockburn added, “It was more of a menace to the taxpayer than enemy aircraft.”
The Army began its rush to failure in 1977, when it drafted its specifications for the Division Air Defense system. The replacement had to be made with existing, reliable components. The contract-winning bid put forth by Ford Aerospace and General Dynamics in 1978 took the tank chassis from the M-48 Patton tank and mounted a turret with twin 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns. It was then topped by the radar unit from an F-16 fighter and linked to a targeting computer that could keep the guns aimed at low-flying jet aircraft.
Ford and General Dynamics would do the work for a fixed price so long as they had little interference from the Army or the Pentagon. With that arrangement, the DIVAD was supposed to come in quickly and cheaply. The Army wanted to buy 614 DIVADs, deploying 36 of these guns per division. Total program cost would probably come out to around $4.5 billion.
Problems with the program appeared early. By January 1980, the Government Accounting Office (GAO) was flagging the risks found in the DIVAD contract, while Pentagon auditors were taking issue with some of the subcontracting practices and documentation by Ford Aerospace.
