US Army Light Infantry Deployability

[Kirkhill]

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2005/Aug/Army_Brigades.htm

Salient points

10 Divisions (Reg) plus NG and Res Divs to become 77 Total Force Units of Action (Brigade Groups)

Existing Brigades have a Logistics Battalion
Brigades to add a Transport Battalion to allow independent deployment

Heavy Brigades currently with 539 Logistics Trucks and 800 Personnel are to increase to 657 trucks and 1000 personnel - (effectively adding a Coy)

Light Brigades currently with 92 trucks are to increase to 584 trucks.

Impact on deployability?   ???
Rationale for not armouring vehicles?   ???

Discuss and debate.   :blotto:

If I thought I understood "Light" before I know longer pretend to understand it now.

 

[Guardian]

Well, they'll be more deployable in-theatre, but I'm hesitant to describe such a brigade as being "more deployable." If these brigades have to deploy to Mexico or Canada, yes, but anywhere else?

A "light brigade" with 584 trucks is not really air-deployable - even the Americans would have to dedicate the majority of their air transport fleet to a deployment for a considerable amount of time. Better to do it by sea, but the time that would take (and the size of the ship) means you might as well pack along a tank battalion and some SP arty while you're at it. So much for "light..."

It makes sense for a unit established in-theatre for a long period of time (Iraq, etc) but for rapid deployments?

 

[Kirkhill]

You know, the more I think about this the more bizarre it seems to become.

Taken together with the emerging trends to larger support vehicles, armoured support vehicles and remotely operated turrets on support vehicles it seems that a credible case can be made is that the US Army is going from Heavy Brigades (with 100 armoured fighting vehicles and 600 unarmoured trucks) and Light Brigades (with no armoured fighting vehicles and 100 unarmoured trucks) to Heavy Brigades that are virtually unchanged except for armouring the trucks, necessitating a 20% increase in numbers to offset the loss of payload, and Light Brigades, still with no armoured fighting vehicles but a tail of 600 wheeled "tanks" - allowing myself to lapse into civvy hyperbole speak for a moment.

Does that mean that a Medium Stryker Brigade with ~3000 bodies will have 300 armoured Strykers and 600 armoured trucks?  3-4 soldiers per 10-20 tonne armoured vehicle?  How deployable is that?

Some folks just don't seem to like/get the Light concept.

 

[a_majoor]

Some folks just don't seem to like/get the Light concept.

You have that right. There has been ferocious institutional resistence to Secretary Rumsfeldt's transformation efforts, and the "Heavy Metal Army" is deeply entrenched in the halls of the Pentagon. Add domestic politics (big new procurment program for all these trucks), and misreading of "lessons learned" in Iraq and Afghanistan and away we go!

This isn't the first (or last) time that theory has trumped practice. In Col David H Hackworth's book "About Face" there is a long interpolation about the US Army's "Pentomic" division, a bizzare structure created in the late 1950s in an effort to have a force capable of fighting on a nuclear battlefield. In this case the structure of the Pentomic division seems to have been derived from speadsheets and computer models (a few exercises with a test division BEFORE adopting the structure would have sorted that idea out in a hurry). For a "light" force doing garrison duty in occupied Iraq (or occupied anywhere else), having a huge fleet of trucks might make some sort of sense in increasing the operational range of the deployed force. This presupposes that the Light force is already there and is there for a very long haul, or can afford a month long sea cruise to the AOR, since they are simply doing a relief in place. The extra firepower and limited protection of the truck fleet might also be argued as a way of reducing the number of casualties in theater, although that is a long streach.

I hope this is mostly a trial baloon, and the lights will go on soon. It shouldn't take much brilliance to see the effect on deployability and sustainability when such a large tail is grafted on to light forces.