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15 Jan 15. US Army Officials: Field Ultralight Vehicles Quickly. For more than a decade, the US Army’s vehicle development efforts have focused on heavily armored vehicles, taking for granted the presence of roadside bombs common to Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Army officials say they want to quickly field a new class of vehicles that trades armor for mobility and lets airborne assault troops drop far from objectives protected by air defense, speed them over land and capture them. The Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence (MCoE) at Fort Benning, Georgia, is seeking the approval of senior Army acquisition officials for a plan to choose from readily available vehicles and field some 300 of them to the service’s global response force (GRF), under the 18th Airborne Corps. Once the program is established, a vendor could be selected and a vehicle fielded in 2016, they say. “Industry is saying, ‘I can build this right now for you, I just need someone to say go,’ ” said Carl Pignato, a light combat vehicle analyst at the MCoE’s mounted requirements division. Senior Army leaders have been calling for such a capability, including Vice Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Daniel Allyn and Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, director of the Army Capabilities and Integration Center. Allyn years earlier, as chief of the 18th Airborne Corps, signed off on an operational-needs request for the capability. “We know that we need a middleweight, mobile, protected firepower platform to allow early entry forces to seize and exploit the initiative,” Allyn told reporters in October. “Our tanks and our Bradleys are the finest fighting platforms in the world, but they’re heavy. You’ve got to seize a major airfield to get them in [to the fight]. You’ll see, in the future, some equipment that’s not quite so heavy, but enables us to have tactical mobility.” The driving force behind the light vehicle effort is the contention, backed by a 2006 Army analysis, that the service lacks the mobility, protection and firepower to enter foreign territory, immediately overcome armed opposition and hold an area that enables further troops to enter, like a major airfield. Because troops in an airborne force are on foot after an airdrop, they have to land close to their objective or lose the initiative, risking their aircrafts’ exposure to air defense artillery. Today, the Army largely relies heavily on the Air Force and Navy to neutralize air defenses, Army officials say. Even Third World powers are assumed to have sophisticated anti-access/area-denial measures arrayed to protect sensitive sites, said Lt. Col. Kevin Parker, light systems branch chief in the Mounted Requirements Division. “If I am going to go into a country and going to seize an airfield so that I can create Bagram Air Base, the assumption has to be they’ve got stuff there that can bring down aircraft,” he said. The MCoE has been floating requirements for two vehicles that seek to answer this gap:
• The ultralight combat vehicle (ULCV) is required to carry an infantry squad with equipment (3,200 pounds); weigh 4,500 pounds and travel 250 to 300 miles on one tank of gas. It must fit inside a CH-47 Chinook, by sling load on a UH-60 Blackhawk and be air-droppable by a C-130 Hercules or C-17 Globemaster.
• The light reconnaissance vehicle (LRV) would provide protection to a moving force. It would carry six scouts with gear and be transportable by a CH-47 internally or by sling load. It would be armored against 152mm shrapnel and host a medium caliber weapon and sensors equivalent to the long-range advance scout surveillance system, in use by Army scouts.
The idea is not to motorize all airborne infantry units, Parker said, but provide a pool of vehicles for the brigade acting as GRF. The GRF mission means being ready to quickly deploy anywhere in the worl