Hardening Land Force vehicles Dr Carlo Kopp One of great success stories of the post-911 counter insurgency campaigns has been the deployment of hardened wheeled vehicles to reduce casualties produced by insurgent placed mines and Improvised Explosive land warfare conference Devices (IED). Generally termed MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles, these hardened trucks and personnel carriers are replacing conventional vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan. While the public perception is that the need for ‘harder’ land force vehicles is driven by While insurgent attacks are often seen as the main imperative for hardening land vehicles, smart munitions with insurgent bombs, the reality is that stand off range have proliferated globally and are a far stronger reason for this critical investment. increasing range in conventional There is little doubt that MRAPs have reduced the used land mines for area denial and for vehicle guided weapons and their global number of personnel casualties dramatically, and ambushes over and over again, and the sorry story proliferation are a much stronger this is clearly a win as it has allowed coalition of Cambodia speaks for itself. imperative. forces to sustain operations that would have The specific use of land mines and improvised This means that in the near term otherwise been impossible to sustain (politically). land mines for vehicle ambushes became common IEDs and land mines have been the single largest during the Vietnam War; later cable or radio link armies will have no choice but cause of combat personnel deaths but, more detonated weapons became a trademark of IRA to fully re-equip with hardened importantly, personnel maimings, as observed in insurgency operations against the British Army and vehicles for in-theatre use – the the counter-insurgency effort since 2001. Western the Ulster constabulary. nations involved in these campaigns, especially Remotely controlled weapons of this ilk can be differentiation between ‘exposed the US, have to carry the burden of medical care used to attack individual ‘high value’ vehicles, such forward deployment’ and ‘secure for the victims of IED and mine attacks for several as trucks loaded with troops, munitions or fuel, or rear area deployment’ is becoming decades. Injuries produced by these weapons to cripple the lead vehicle in a convoy to initiate a increasingly meaningless. include loss of limbs, internal organ injuries, spinal conventional infantry style ambush. injuries, shrapnel injuries, blindings and brain In Iraq, improvised weapon explosive components injuries. Improvements in battlefield MedEvac and included 155 mm and 152 mm artillery shells, LPG in-theatre treatment have resulted in many more bottles, landmines, and even aerial bombs of up to personnel surviving very severe blast injuries than 500 kg or greater weight. in any other previous campaign. That IEDs would prove to be the plague they The massed deployment of MRAP category vehicles became in Iraq and later Afghanistan is with as replacements for conventional ‘flat bottomed’ hindsight inevitable. truck and HMMWV fleets raises questions about After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, insurgents the nature of modern conflicts, but also presents repeatedly launched conventional ‘infantry style’ important lessons. Perhaps the most fundamental attacks on coalition troops. More than often lesson is that in war winners are those who can the outcome was disastrous for the insurgents, adapt and evolve faster than their opponents, and with typical kill ratios in close quarter infantry those who cannot adapt become losers. combat amounting to dozens of insurgents for every coalition soldier killed. Superior discipline, hardened vehIcles In counter training and tactics produced this outcome, and to a lesser extent, body armour and better infantry Insurgency operatIons - the present weapons. When armour, attack helicopters or CAS The use of landmines and more recently IEDs aircraft were on hand, the results were even more as a tool for the interdiction of road transport is disastrous for the insurgents. Massing insurgent In modern wars, the whole theatre is the FEBA, not new; indeed landmines are now a pervasive and all vehicles must be hardened. personnel more than often provided opportunities problem in a large part due to their success in the for intelligence to locate the insurgents and identify Second World War. During the Cold War both sides them, enabling devastating aerial attacks using 26 - DefenceToday DT_OCT2010_LODfinal.indd 26 1/11/10 4:15 PM Military Vehicles_Layout 1 15/09/10 9:08 AM Page 1 While the public perception is that the need for "harder" land force vehicles is driven by insurgent bombs, the reality is that increasing range in conventional guided weapons and their global proliferation are a much stronger long term imperative. precision guided bombs. Importantly, repeated as the HMMWV (Humvee). Only a small number particularly dangerous areas to sustain resupply attacks of this kind resulted in the progressive ‘self- of vehicles were hardened, such as specialised and to deploy troops for combat operations. annihilation’ of insurgent leaders and followers HMMWV variants following the well publicised A major effort was launched to use ISR to locate who favoured this approach. difficulties in Somalia. ‘bomb factories’ and interdict IED emplacement Inevitably, the insurgent leaders and groups who Major General Jim Molan (Retd) observed the teams, an effort that sometimes yielded good preferred sniper attacks and IED attacks were following in his 2008 book ‘Running the War in results but often poor results. The technological all who remained, and new recruits in turn were Iraq’. (see separate interview) problems in using ISR for detecting, tracking indoctrinated to use these methods rather than “In the IED Working Group, I was quickly into and identifying both insurgents on the ground or infantry style assaults. Alas, this is the normal statistics. At that stage, early in 2004, about one- emplaced IEDs are not easily solved. land warfare conference process of adaptation: the evolution in tactics and third of all attacks on the coalition used IEDs. On To the credit of US commanders and personnel in techniques over centuries in all warfare. any one day we had about 50 IED incidents. Of the theatre, the IED problem was well understood The problem was exacerbated by the ample supply those 50 bombs we found about half before they early at both a tactical and strategic level. In that of explosive materials, especially artillery shells, exploded. Two or three exploded accidentally as sense the ‘adaptation’ to the rapidly evolving threat which Saddam’s regime dispersed across the they were being emplaced, either because we was sound. country. Politically mandated limits on the number were using electronic countermeasures or because The aspect of ‘adaptation’ which proved more of US personnel deployed for the occupation of of a lack of skill on the bombers’ part. This left an difficult was execution – the process of securing Iraq precluded the rapid collection and disposal of average of 20 bombs each day that were exploded sufficient funding, implementing the hardening of this stockpile, large portions of which were in turn against us: one coalition soldier was being killed existing vehicles, and deployment to theatre of collected and cached by insurgents for future use every two days. Apart from the deaths, the injuries replacement vehicles. as IED feedstock materiel. were appalling.” For comparison, the problem of dealing with an IED In forensically exploring the IED problem, the most “We conducted operations specifically against the type of threat is not new and other case studies interesting subject is how quickly the Coalition was bombers, and as we killed the ones with experience exist. The Vietnam conflict is one example, where able to adapt to the rapidly evolving insurgency. novice bomb-makers stepped up, which meant the convoy and vehicle ambushes were common, While the IED offensive in Iraq ultimately failed as rate of premature explosions increased. We put a albeit not on the scale of Iraq. a campaign for the insurgents, it did expose the lot of effort into making the troops ‘bomb-smart’: The South African experience in Namibia and Angola extent to which bureaucratic micromanagement we produced pamphlets, pocket cards, videos and is the real case study of interest. Fighting Soviet of military matters and lethargic procurement newsletters, and we made training compulsory. sponsored insurgent groups and Cuban Special practices can hamper the ability to rapidly respond But it was really the natural cunning and ability Forces across large areas of thinly populated to changes in the operational environment. of the soldiers that kept casualties relatively low. bush, the South Africans soon experienced heavy When Coalition forces rolled into Iraq in 2003, much Experience and training told soldiers where not to losses in rear areas due to landmines. Lacking of the land force inventory comprised equipment go and what discarded garbage might be hiding the population numbers to sustain heavy losses, developed during the late Cold War period. The a bomb. The coalition relied a lot on luck and on and the resources to use conventional armoured Cold War was a ‘conventional’ conflict in the sense electronic technology, but experience and training vehicles exclusively across the theatre, the South that NATO and Warsaw Pact ground forces would accounted for most of our successes, which were Africans adapted and evolved. have fought a traditional manoeuvre land warfare satisfying but never enough to protect all our The result was the Buffel armoured personnel battle, with heavy armoured manoeuvre forces soldiers, and never enough for our critics in the carrier and logistical resupply vehicle, and punching holes through the FEBA (Forward Edge of media.” Casspir armoured truck or in contemporary terms, Mercedes-Benz Military Vehicles the Battle Area) to ‘envelop’ opposing strongpoints, When IED attacks began to escalate, and casualties ‘MRAP’. Both featured armoured cabins, and the and cut lines of supply.