In a Sources Sought Notice published on 24 September, 2018 by Product Lead, Ground Mobility Vehicles (PL GMV), they are conducting a market survey for new production of an Infantry Squad Vehicle (ISV).
According to the notice, the ISV will provide mobility for a 9-soldier infantry squad with associated equipment to move around the close battle area. The ISV is a lightweight, high mobility platform that shall be transportable by all means including vertical lift (via CH47 and UH60) and Low Velocity Air Drop (LVAD).
Additional requirements include:
Physical Characteristics: Platform characteristics will be heavily influenced by mobility, payload and by the vertical lift characteristics of the UH60 and internal transport dimensions of the CH47 as defined in MIL-HDBK-1791 and MIL-STD-1366. For purposes of this questionnaire, the ISV shall meet its transportability and aerial delivery requirements at Vehicle Curb Weight (VCW) defined as an empty vehicle with Basic Issue Items (BII), a ¾ complement of fuel, lubricants, coolant, and hydraulic fluid (as applicable). Based on current research and requirements for UH-60 Sling Load capabilities the VCW at a maximum must be 4,800 lbs. Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW) will apply to all other weight requirements. GVW is defined as VCW plus operational payload of Soldiers and their associated equipment and supplies. The GVW will be the VCW with a nine soldier payload (i.e. 3200lbs). The Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) will be the VCW plus maximum designed payload.
Military Specific Modifications: Blackout Lights, weapon mounts, Chemical Agent Resistant Coating (CARC) paint, 24V electrical, MIL-STD-814/MIL-STD-209K provisions, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Slave and Military Petroleum, Oils and Lubricants (POL)
Mobility: The ISV shall be a vehicle capable of traversing longitudinal grades up to 60%. The ISV shall be capable of meeting the mobility requirements from VCW to GVW on the following terrain profiles:
Survivability: The ISV is envisioned as a lightweight, highly mobile open cab vehicle. Survivability will be achieved through high mobility, a roll cage and occupant restraints.
Transportability: The ISV shall be transportable by the following means: C-17/C-130 airdrop including C-17 Dual Row Airdrop System (DRAS), C-17/C-130 internal transport in roll-on/roll-off (RORO) configuration, CH-47 internal transport, CH-47/UH-60 external transport, rail and sea.
Environmental: The ISV shall be capable of operating in Hot/Basic/Cold as defined in Army Regulation (AR)-38. The ISV shall be capable of saltwater/freshwater fording and operating in adverse environmental conditions as defined in MIL-STD-810 (e.g. blowing rain, blowing dust, salt fog, etc.).
The total number of vehicles is 2,065, procuring 100 per year, beginning in 2020.
Any potential solicitation (and resulting contract) would acquire Government Purpose Rights to associated technical data, logistical and test support, installation kits and ancillary hardware with the vehicles. The ancillary hardware includes, but is not limited to, Basic Issue Items (BII), special tools, new specialty kits, expeditionary field kits, initial support items, self-recovery winch kits, and extended draw bars.
Responses are required by Oct 26, 2018 5:00 pm Eastern. Visit www.fbo.gov for full details.
Dude, that’s awesome. It’s like that 4-door from GI JOE that Clutch drove!
http://generalsjoes.com/reviews/2011/renegades_30th_ann/vehicles/vamp.htmL
Yank the weapons and install a ring mount, and that’s pretty much it.
Bro, you just brought back some old memories!
9 Joes in a dune buggy, what could possibly go wrong?
“Well, you see Sir, we were on our way to the bingo parlor…”
We’ve been here, before… I think it was called 9th ID (Motorized).
Question I’ve got is the same one I had back when I was running around Yakima Firing Center in a HMMWV with a roll cage and seats for six in back: How, exactly, is this supposed to work on a battlefield with even a slightly competent enemy on it? No armor against direct fire, no frag protection, just a bit of canvas and whatever ballistic protection you get from your TA-50 hanging off the sides…
What’s the threat profile this is supposed to work against, again? I gotta be quite honest, I’m not even sure I’d be wanting to take the freakin’ Motorized concept to the Indian Wars of the late 19th Century, unless you were to somehow ensure the Indians didn’t have anything but bows and arrows. Looking back on it, the 9th was a division-scale Little Big Horn just waiting to happen, because no matter how mobile you think you are, the fact is, you’re inevitably going to get pinned down by someone with indirect and/or CAS; once that happens, in an unarmored vehicle, well… You’re toasty-fried.
More I think about it, the 9th was a Really Poorly Thought-Out Idea(TM).
1. I assume these will be employed the same way as Strykers are utilized at NTC. I.E. transport Squads of soldiers rapidly to key terrain. Then soldiers dismount and dig in or soldiers move onto the obj potentially supported by the MGs on the vics.
2. I see your point but SOF units have been using the little GMVs all over the GWOT in the last few years (AFG, IRQ, SYR). They’ve been used consistently outside the wire despite SAF and IED threats.
I see the point you’re making about mobility, and I’m not going to disagree with you. The problem with this crap isn’t the vehicle, the concept, or even the troops. The bloody problem (adjective chosen deliberately) is that the brass does not “get” this crap. At. All.
I had a worms-eye view of the 9th. Great concept, except for one thing: The brass kept up the fantasy that we were somehow going to take on near-peer competition, and live. Ain’t happening.
To a degree, I think a lot of what the 9th was came out of a refusal to recognize reality: The Army is not going to be deployed to deal with lightweight threats that these vehicles and the mindset they represent can deal with, at the present time. The US has other tools to deal with things like the Libyans expanding into the Sahara, and you saw that with the thing I feel like a lot of people were trying to emulate, the Chadian “technicals” that took on Libyan armor in the deserts of North Africa. Problem with that is that concept is predicated on an essentially incompetent enemy that can’t coordinate things like artillery and/or basic combat tactics. You want something like the 9th ID to be more than a death trap for a bunch of US troops, then you need to make damn sure you’re only ever going to put them up against Libyans of the 1980’s vintage, in terms of competence.
Mobility, I get. The problem is, people keep fantasizing that you can do modern war near-peer level without armor of any kind, and that’s simply not happening. With the proliferation of heavy machineguns, light AT weapons, and indirect fire assets, if you don’t have your troops under armor, they’re so much dead meat. Sad, but true fact.
Don’t have the troops under some kind of armor, and you’re going to recap the whole post-war experience in Iraq, all over again. It’s well past time to admit that the prototype for most modern wars is not going to be the fantasy-island light infantry BS we’ve postulated, but that it’s going to look a lot more like the South African experience in their Bosoorlog campaigns. Or, it’s gonna be straight-up urban siege warfare that we’re not even bothering to really prepare for.
I can’t emphasize enough how important an in-depth study of the South African Bush Wars is, especially pertaining to how mechanized tactics should be done.
One should just take a cursory glance at the damned vehicles the SADF Army used. That alone speaks a million words.
And its damn infuriating that *nobody* on our side of things learned anything from those conflicts, which would be one of the canaries in the coalmine indicating what kind of wars we would find ourselves in decades later.
Look at the critical importance of MRAPs for christ’s sakes.
Been saying that since the late 1980s. Nobody listened.
If you haven’t read “Taming the Landmine”, by Peter Stiff, you should. If that idea bores you, then you probably aren’t keeping up on your professional development.
(Generalized “you” there, not Balais…)
Indirect or CAS? I wasn’t aware that there’s an Infantry vehicle out there that will survive direct hits from either. Do we fair any better against those threats as dismounted troops? Nope! What the vehicle will let you do is unass that area a lot faster than the old “12 O’clock! 300m!” does in a light Infantry capacity. Or how about we revisit things we’ve forgotten about like digging in, noise/light/litter discipline, etc., to add to that survivability by making them harder to detect?
Now, what about reduction of Soldier load on the move? What about added carrying capacity to reduce frequency of resupply? Survivability comes in more than one form. If you intentionally get into a knife fight armed with a plastic spoon, your planning sucks. If you take these head-on against T90s or a fortified defensive position intentionally, your planning sucks. Now, use these to maneuver and resupply Javelin teams around key terrain in a battlefield to deal with said T90s and you’re probably going to have some success.
Just because it has wheels and a gun mounted doesn’t mean you have to play Patton or Rommel with it (though some will never realize that and I think that’s ultimately what you’re getting at Kirk)…
“Survivability will be achieved through high mobility, a roll cage and occupant restraints.”
Add “…, and not getting shot at.”
“…will provide mobility for a 9-soldier infantry squad with associated equipment to move around the close battle area.”
This gets closer to your CONOPS. This is a support vehicle, not an assault vehicle. Moving heavy weapons and mortars, ammo resupply, chow, MEDEVAC, communications support (to included charging station), and reducing the soldiers’ load.
But with that all in mind, it seems a bit over-engineered. Some version of an ARGO seems more applicable and affordable, and leadership won’t be tempted to plan operations as though it were a fighting vehicle.
Oh, holy f**k, can I tell Mac hasn’t ever had the dubious pleasure of trying to stand up to tanks with this kind of lightweight half-assery.
I have nightmarish memories of specific exercises that, while fun at the time, basically implicated that we were flat-out gonna die if we went to war. Said exercises included going up against the last brigade of M60 tanks out of Fort Carson, before they re-equipped. HMMWV against tank? LOL… The idea was that we’d set up successive kill-zones down the Central Corridor of Yakima Firing Center, and attrit the bastards. Didn’t. Work. Once.
Well, after the umpires got involved, well, yeah… It did. For a certain value of “worked”. If you didn’t mind the implications of them blowing the crap out of every single AT unit we had. HMMWV/TOW battalions are emphatically not a match for even a platoon of tanks that’s crewed by people who know what they’re doing. Libyans, with T-62s? Maybe.
I’ve got some really fun memories of being used to emplace obstacles out in front of the HMMWV outfits, and then having to flee at the last minute back through the kill zones, only to watch most of the “lunch lights” up in the hills go on as the tanks found the TOW positions with thermals. Not fun.
Also, in the “not fun” category, was the fact that a lot of the Infantry commanders later came to the conclusion that the highest and best purpose of their Engineer slice element was as bait for the tankers…
Looking back, this was a really fun part of my career. It was also, I’m afraid, entirely pointless, in a “real warmaking” sense. Shit doesn’t work, yo…
Like someone I knew used to say, “We’re all victims of our own frame of reference.”
I’ve seen the exact opposite of what you describe.
“Just because it has wheels and a gun mounted doesn’t mean you have to play Patton or Rommel with it”
Thats the same attitude big army has, pertaining to the possibility of having heavier weapons on the Stryker and Bradley, and we’re all the poorer for it.*
Sometimes *you do have to go patton or rommel* because murphy has a bad habit of showing up and kicking over your chessboard.
*The Dragoon Stryker *was* fielded recently, which is *decades* too late. That would have been the most ideal weapon to use in OIF and OEF, while still being an effective counter-piece for our current Russia escalation.
**btw, where are our MGS’s???
Don’t forget, during that 1980’s period of dune buggies, HMMWV’s, (and even at least one camo-fabric ultra-light airplane), the 9th ID was called the “EXPERIMENTAL Test-bed Division”. Thanks Kirk for the memories, for I doubt that the AARs and LEssons Learned from that experiment get checked out of the library very often! (after all, that was in the past, and we ain’t got time for old stuff in today’s Army!)
Pretty neat concept. (As long as it doesn’t go the way of the Stryker).
>> Army wants to be highly mobile with firepower.
>> High speed low drag hooah. Interim BCT!
>> Stryker must fit in a C130!
>> SBCT must be deployable anywhere in the world within 96 hours!
>> Load up the Strykers in the C130s bois!
>> rpgs.jpg
>> Adds on Slat Armor Upgrade. Oof. Too wide for C130 now.
>> ieds.jpg
>> Adds on Double V-Hull (DVH) Upgrade. Oof. Too heavy for C130 now.
>> Russians.jpg
>> 30mm Cannon and Javelin Upgrade!! Oof. Too tall for C130 now.
>>NoParts.jpg
>>Oh, guess we need to actually train people on how to maintain these!
>>DeployToNTC.jpg
>>Well, let’s try using these head-on against an armor BCT, what could go wrong?
>>FlamingWreckage.jpg
I refuse to let you besmirch the impeccable decision making skills of Our Betters in the Army high command (puts on black beret). Good day, sir (checks UCP’s in mirror while heading to the door)!
I just spent the month of August at NTC with our SBCT, and I will say that is not our fight in the open desert without armor support.
They Big Army still does not have a correct plan to how to effectively use Strykers, they want to use us as a near peer weapon but we have a coin structure.
Stryker is basically the Army wanting to be Marines, IMHO. Not a bad concept, in terms of using the brigades as Cavalry in concept and mission, but tackling even near-peer forces? It is to laugh.
If they’d have been serious about 9th ID (Motorized), then they would have had their brigades look a lot like an SBCT. They weren’t, and that whole “One division, under canvas, on HMMWV…” thing was a sad joke. When a dude with a PKM can take out your whole platoon as it moves up a wadi, or some ass-clowns with a mortar can take you down after you get stopped by a log across a road… That’s a bad idea.
Hey now, I’ve been to NTC twice with the 3d Cavalry Regiment and didn’t get killed once during either!!
I heard similar stories through the grapevine about 1/25BCT. Any truth to that?
You forgot the most important thing, “The Stryker is *INTERIM* dammit!”
If the Army cared, they would be itching to piggy back off the USMC’s ACV program, which I believe selected the SuperAV IIRC.
Just adopt a automated turreted heavy mortar, MGS, IFV with an actual cannon, and SHORAD system. Done. Cross-branch commonality. Everybody wins (except GDLS).
OK, lemme lay out my objections to this idea, as someone who lived the life as a HMMWV-mounted squad leader.
Mobility is good. Mobility is life, even. Problem with it is that mobility has also got certain disadvantages, as well.
Yeah, you can get there “fustest with the mostest”, but the problem is that you can also “mobility” yourself into a shit-load of trouble that you’d never, ever wander into while on foot. Because you’d see it.
Trust me, the signs of an ambush having been laid don’t get easier to spot at 30 miles an hour. At. All. The advantages of “mobility” are predicated on you not having to deal with an enemy that is either competent, or who has any dedication at all to their craft. When you’re not under armor, any ass-clown with a PK is capable of taking you out, on the move. Odds of making it really easy for said ass-clown to find a way to use that PK on your ass, when you’re bopping around the countryside at 30mph? Lots and lots higher.
I think there’s an equation to be written, one that describes the relationship between “speed of tactical movement” and “vulnerability to surprise”. The possession of armor modifies this, to enable the equation to work out such that moving fast doesn’t kill you when you’re running up the wadi towards an intermediate objective.
To make these things work out, when dealing with an even slightly competent enemy, you need either total omniscience, or some armor. Otherwise, dude with PK is gonna flat-out ruin your lovely commander’s intent.
And, yeah, I totally get that a wise commander is not going to use unarmored assets inappropriately. Trouble is, that “wise commander” is oftentimes only going to result from said commander learning the limitations of his tools, and that’s gonna cost some lives, every time we go to make one.
It’s a sad and unfortunate reality that modern warfare implies that if you’re gonna go bopping around at 30mph on the battlefield, you’d better be protected against at least 7.62mm MG fire, indirect, and be able to maintain mobility after a few hits from an RPG. Otherwise, you’d better be going slow and steady, on foot, in order not to get your ass into situations you can’t deal with at 30mph.
Been there, done that, have the t-shirts. Enjoyed it, but when I think of having actually had to take troops up against even Iraqis during Desert Storm, equipped like that…? I get the colly-wobbles. I don’t think many of us would have been coming home, had the cards gone against us in even the slightest manner. Unarmored wheeled vehicles have a place–On the goddamn FOBs, hauling around logistics. Outside protected base areas? LOL… Don’t trigger my high, mad laughter.
This was probably one of the best comments I’ve ever read on this site.
This^^^^
Interesting discussion. Looking at the requirements,and assuming how these are going to be used, I understand the desire to have something similar. Like someone else mentioned UTV’s and ATV’s are being used in a lot of cases where nothing else works, where even a HiLUX is a little big. The trouble is trying to fit an entire squad and gear into something that is still that small.the Razr equipped with the rear benches will carry the guys but not much else.
What we may be missing here is Urban usage. We’re not talking about open warfare,or stustained operations. We’re talking about quick air deployable cordons and raids. Take a look at this year’s SOFIC demonstration. How long does it take a convoy to drive across LA or Lagos Nigeria? Hours? Do we land guys miles away and patrol for hours and miss opportunities? Or do we give them a means to get in and out in minutes? Something to think about…..
James… Look, this is basically the same sort of assumptions that lead to SOCOM bubbas failing to account for the presence of shepherds and other types out and about where they’re getting ready to do their thing. The fiasco with Bravo Two-Zero happened because they were stumbled upon by a “…herd of sheep and a young shepherd…”. That was in 1991; what the fuck did we do with our SEALs in Afghanistan during Operation Red Wings in 2005? 14 fucking years of experience and a multitude of other similar incidents, and we still hadn’t figured out that third-world agriculture leads to a lot of people wandering around with animals, and that there’s a huge chance of compromise. Are we a learning organization…? Oh, fuck no; we’re dumb as rocks.
And, here’s where that’s relevant to this insanity of unarmored vehicles running around like madmen–When you’re in an unarmored vehicle, shit happens. Bad shit, shit like running into a scout element or something else carrying an MG or RPG. I have distinct memories of running up a wadi with my platoon, separated as best we could be, under the circumstances, and then discovering that our carefully-planned egress route was under observation by the enemy’s scouts. We got lit up, and my entire platoon wound up sitting the rest of the battle out after that little encounter. Peacetime exercise? Yeah; however, it’s indicative of the root problem–Lack of armor on these vehicles means you can’t survive even the most ridiculously lightly armed opposition. Those scouts? They were in their First Sergeant’s borrowed HMMWV, had a borrowed M60, and they capped us and the Infantry we were with. 1 MG, three guys in a HMMWV, and we kissed goodbye to the task force Engineer element and a platoon of infantry in about two minutes. Real life wouldn’t have been much different, either–With the proliferation of weapons like the PKM and RPGs, you simply cannot blithely roam hither and yon across the battlefield, expecting that you’re going to accomplish much more than filling a bunch of body bags for the Graves Registration teams in the aftermath.
These vehicles need light armor, period–At least to the minimum of being able to take hits from a PKM team, artillery fragments, and maybe the odd RPG. Additionally, there’s the problem of “Oh shit… They hit the radiator/oil cooler/fuel line… We’re fucked…”. The vehicles themselves need to be able to survive some hits, or the guys they’re carrying are gonna be right back to hoofing it, without the benefit of all that additional crap they carried on the vehicle, and likely being well out of range for successful foot-mobile egress. I’m here to tell you that there ain’t nothing like having your vehicle shot out from under you when you’re thirty or forty km away from the nearest friendlies, and that happens a lot with this “highly mobile and fluid form of warfare”. Fast and highly mobile purely sucks when the mobility juice goes bubbling away in the form of a radiator leak or a broken HMMWV. Been there, done that.
This stuff is, frankly, nuts. You want to use unarmored vehicles as logistics supplements to basically foot-mobile guys? OK, fine; I agree that the idea is a good one. Start upping the game to what we were doing back in the days of the 9th, and I’m gonna tell you you’re out of your goddamn minds. Completely, absolutely, irrevocably out your fucking minds… Without at least enough armor to protect against medium machine gun fire and fragment threats, this is an insane concept in today’s combat environment.
Hell, it was nuts back when the only real threat was Native Americans with Winchesters, to be quite honest. After what 7th ID (L) did to us a couple of times, I’m not even sanguine about taking on unarmored enemies from HMMWV-like vehicles–It’s way, way too easy for good light infantry to set ambushes you move into because “OPTEMPO”, and then you wake up to the fact that you can’t spot too much doing cross-country at that 30mph rate of movement. It’s all cool, when you don’t have to worry about the stuff those pesky light infantry guys can carry, but when they can take out your bloody trucks with a damn BB gun, well… The shoe of initiative soon goes onto the other foot.
In short, I can’t think of a single damn situation where I’d want to be doing tactical movement against any realistic foe with unarmored vehicles. Period. Hell, even in Somalia during the relief operations, you needed armor…
I get that, and completely agree, but thats not what I’m saying in the least. You’re right about unarmored vehicles , or even lightly armored vehicles anywhere, they’ll be torn to shreds. You’re not i,n the near term anyway, going to be able to air deploy even a JLTV in the way you will have to, the there are places you just cant take a truck. So armor isn’t an option, it’s on foot or in a vehicle. Your point about SA while on door patrol is spot on . You say we didn’t learn anything from Bravo2zero or Redwings that were both doir patrols and offset insertions ( cant remember if 2zero was heliborne) and bith got shot to shit. What if what we learned was that the guys in land cruisers and GMV’s and Pinzgauers didn’t get shot up as much, and the SF guys riding ATV’s were gone before the Talis could find them. Armour is good, great even, but what are you gonna do when it’s not an option? Walk everywhere? Refuse? I
In cities people know you’re there ,even more than in farmlands. If on foot you have a couple of choices, insert on the target or patrol through a city while guys set up that PKM down the long axis of an alley they grew up playing in and you haven’t even seen on a map.I’m not saying it should be a daily thing but there are a few places where it fits and nothing else currently does.
Damn autocorrect and small keyboard ate me alive on that one, sorry guys.
Vehicle-mounted SOCOM I can’t speak to; having the assets those guys get, and the attention from higher makes their world a lot different from the world of the average line soldier down at the pointy end of the conventional stick.
I think that the issue isn’t so much “can SOCOM make this work” as “does it work for the conventional guys”. For the conventional purpose, where you don’t have the ability to call in 160th SOAR to come pick your ass up when shit goes south, this idea of “unarmored and unalloyed mobility” is sheer fucking stupidity. A lot of SOF seems to forget how different life is, outside their lavishly supported operations. As a Combat Engineer squad leader out in front of 9th ID’s anti-armor assets, I was on my own, with a crappy little PRC-77 as my only link to support, and there was no real support to be had, if things went south during a mission. And, the reality is, every mission was a suicide mission, because of that lack of armor and support. SOF guys can call for an evac and run for it, relying on mobility to get there in a hurry; conventional guys are going to be out there nosing around, and getting into trouble at 30mph, without recourse or lavish support. What works for SOCOM ain’t going to work for the line guys, period.
Key thing I think needs to be looked at is overall survivability–The engines and mechanical bits need to be designed with an eye towards combat reality. Air-cooled? Yes. Water-cooled? Oh, hells to the no… Similarly, the vehicles need to be built such that they’re like the South African SAMIL line of trucks and armor, with modularity and field-repairability built in. Common tires, common wheel stations outside the armor envelope, air-cooled engines, and all the rest. If you can take out the engine with an individual weapon, which you can easily do with the HMMWV, well… That’s not good enough. At all.
I think that there’s an argument to be made for something that’s entirely modular, basically a ruggedized skeletal chassis that you can attach the armor and body structure to easily and in the field. Build it with the air-cooled diesel engines, make the central skeleton rugged enough to handle some realistic combat damage, and still be repairable, then have the crew capsule and cargo areas bolt on to it as needed. If you’re in an environment where you have to do everything by air, fine–Fly in the chassis on one helicopter, and then bring in the rest of the vehicle with another aircraft.
If you looked at the Czech Tatra trucks, with the central load-carrying tubular chassis that contains all the components of the drive train, you get an idea of what I’m suggesting. Do the chassis separately, and make it easy to mount the crew capsule and cargo body to, in the field, and you’re going to be able to get around the issues of whether or not you’re light enough to be air-mobile.
Hell, to be honest, I think everything ought to be designed like that–Basic chassis separate from the rest of the components, and then add on as needed. If you had the Stryker built like that, you could easily drive the chassis onto the aircraft, and then the rest of the load could go on using a mobility frame for shipping. Get to where you want to use the damn things, and then you simply do like a guy with a camper shell on his pickup–Put a jack on all four corners somewhere flat, pull out the mobility frame, and then back the chassis under the modular crew capsule and payload components.
Do it intelligently, and you could do a mix/match configuration thing for each mission–Need more fire support? Fine; send in the 120mm automatic mortar modules. Which, if you were smart, would also be capable of being used while dismounted in the FOB for fires support, just like the rest of the kit. Need a command post…? Fine; let it come off the chassis, and then use it as a logistics asset for the unit, hauling supplies until it’s needed again to move the CP. The way we have all these damn vehicles sitting around doing nothing most of the time, when they’re really only there to provide half-ass mobility for these mostly-static elements is just nuts; put that shit to work–If the commander doesn’t need to move, why the hell is there a M577-equivalent sitting around falling apart without maintenance? Pull the command post, let the chassis and crew capsule go do something with themselves…
while i agree to points you say kirk, and appreciate you experience. that was what almost 30 years ago? Tech and tactics have come along way. While your piece of the pie was a huge failer, there has been plenty of real big success in using highly mobile soft skin vehicles. LRDP, SAS/Jedberg teams, Rhodesians, the use of the M274 in nam. there was also a unit in nam who used armed dun buggies and was very successful. And there have been many more. I see these as being a big benniffett, should they be use in every scenario? no. but i can see plenty where this asset would be amazing. I see it being used to move to the ORP for a mission or even to quickly maneuver units behind friendly lines, without worrying about having to coordinate trans. As a Platoon Sgt i would love to have even one of these at my disposal, for resupply or CASEVAC. to beable to load up a few thousand extra rounds for my gun teams or a bunch of 60mm for the mortars. or even carrying water and food to lighten my guys load. Even with a near peer fight, There will be real lines again. For a qrf or reserves to move to areas of the line that need to be shored up. Or if you in the defense being able to resupply ammo and pull casualties. worst comes to worst u can bring a mobile machine gun to weak spots.
and lets look at the future of warfare. urban Spral and mega cities (talking near peer). for all the reason i listed above is even more important. ur not going to be able to get large armored resupply convoys to get to you. in mega cities Companies and Platoons will be basically on there own (armys official stance). so for a small fast vehicle that i can use to maneuver my troops where they are needed or get resupply in streets that larger vehicles cant get throu because of rubble or size or weight. it will be a great asset. Just not the asset for ever situation.
Very interesting reading and input. Thanks SSD for the great site.