Hey, if we still had to defend the Fulda Gap, I'm with you!"
You've hit upon the crux of the argument. Lindy is claiming (with some merit) that the US is now redesigning its military as a LIC oriented rapid deployment force.
But that ignores the fact that wars such as we would likely be required to fight in the Middle East, or even potentially with China, would not be low intensity conflicts, but rather, of a major scale. And there's NOTHING better at breaking up human wave assaults than Proximity Fuzed airburst rounds delivered in Time on Target barrages.
And one other aspect that Lindy seems to forget is that artillerymen get tired. Those rounds are heavy and the more they load, the slower they get. The Crusader has an auto-loader, thus being able to fire continuously, if necessary, since it also possesses a means of cooling the tube as well. And I understand that they don't have a manual back-up to the auto-loader since the crew and weapons area are separated in the interest of crew survivability. I don't necessarily like this concept, but understand the logic. Auto-loaders can be fickle mechanisms under combat conditions.
But if not the Crusader, then the Pentagon should look VERY HARD at what the Germans have built. The PZH 2000 has a manual back up in case the auto-loader fails and apparently has capabilities that approach those of the Crusader. The problem is that it ALSO weighs in at some 60 Tonnes:
army-technology.com
But the bottom line is that we should not constrain ourselves to solely being able to fight a low-intensity conflict. If we do so, then we're more than likely to wind up fighting a major conflict because our adversaries and rivals will know that the US is a "paper tiger" that might be able to bomb, but can't seize territory or defend itself from large groups of infantry.
And the argument justifying this argument is found in our nuclear weapons arsenal.. How much have we spent on weapons that we never have used in combat? But I will never regret that we spent it because they kept a semblance of peace for 50 years through it own form of mutual terror.
Hawk |
