armybuck041 said:
Hey don't get me wrong, its just day after day I see people slam equipment on here, or pick it apart so bad it leaves the slightly less educated confused. I think that this purchase is a step in the right direction. Feedback about the G-Wagons made its way upstairs and I think they came up with a reasonable compromise with this.
Listen up ney sayers:
Its not a fish bowl.
It can be fought out of quite easily with Small Arms from its 9 hatches.
It has more blast/frag protection that a LAV III. Yes, the glass is very thick and strong. We shot a spare panel with a .50 Cal to answer our own curiousities.
It provides the complete crew and passengers with much more situational awareness than any other A-Veh.
And you didn't have to wait 10 years to get it.
I agree wholeheartedly that the RG31 purchase is a very good (and big) step in the right direction. I remember learning about the RG31 a few years back and finding myself wondering why the military wasn't acquiring a whole fleet of them. In my estimation, the RG31 would be near-perfect for army reserve infantry, armour and artillery units, because it could operate as an APC, recce vehicle, mini-CP, signals vehicle, gun tractor and liaison vehicle all rolled into one, without requiring you to create expensive variants to fulfill each of the roles. The big bonus is that the RG31's armour would let such units operate in conditions where the more traditional soft-skinned vehicles typically employed in these roles could not.
At a million bucks a crack, the price can't be beat. I mean, think of it this way. It cost the military some $1.2 billion to acquire 651 LAV-III APC's, of which only 313 are actually intended to carry infantry. That works out to around $2.5 ~ 3 million a copy depending on its role, to support one understrength brigade group of 2,400 troops. The same money applied to an RG31 purchase might let you buy 1200 vehicles and support 9,600 infantry troops if all of the vehicles were used solely as APC's.
In fairness to the LAV III, the one weakness of the RG-31 is its inability to carry heavier armament like a 25mm Chain Gun or TUA turret. But I still question the wisdom of trying to shoehorn wheeled, relatively lightly armoured vehicles like the LAV III into combat roles intended for better-armoured tanks and tracked infantry fighting vehicles which carry 30 or 40mm main guns.
The British Army used armoured Land Rovers and Humber trucks (AKA 'pigs') in Northern Ireland as APC's and patrol vehicles and had great success with them in counter-revolutionary/counter-terrorist warfare in urban settings. Since the RG31's could be thought of as Humber 'pigs' on steroids, they seem perfectly suited to the work the army needs to do in Afghanistan.
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