One factor that isn't discussed much is the value of controlling the battlefield after the rounds stop flying. This Strategypage article notes an interesting feature of the insurgencise in Iraq:
While nearly 2,000 troops have been killed by these bombs, more than ten times as many vehicles have been damaged, but not destroyed, by these attacks. In fact, most roadside bombs that go off don't kill, or even injure, any troops. The vehicles are more frequently damaged, sometimes badly, but not so much that the vehicle cannot be repaired. But that calculation has to take into account transport costs, to get the busted vehicle to the repair shop. With the large quantity of banged up vehicles, it quickly became obvious that it would be cheaper to bring the repair crews and their equipment (tools and replacement parts) to the Persian Gulf.
Can you imagine the impact of our having lost 20,000 vehicles in combat? But we have been able to recover and repair almost all of those damaged vehicles and return them to service. The crews survive those hits and can man them again once repaired.
This highlights a feature of armored warfare long evident. Controlling the battlefield is key to winning the campaign. If you control the battlefield, you can recover the 90% or more of vehicles lost from minor hits, mechanical breakdown, or just getting stuck and abandoned. Just as important, you keep the enemy from recovering their immobilized vehicles. Keep doing that battle after battle and the balance of forces can swing dramatically through attrition. Controlling the battlefield, as we do in Iraq, provides dramatic benefits for us.
This leads to another issue, how we kill enemy armor (or defend our own). While the most obvious way to kill enemy armor is to penetrate its armor to detonate ammunition and fuel with a dramatic explosion that sends a turret spinning through the air to land 50 meters away, soft kills knock out a tank just as surely in the short run.
In situations where we can reasonably predict that we will control the battlefield for at least a week or so, we can afford to kill enemy vehicles with soft kills. Given time, our troops can blow up enemy vehicles damaged or tow them away to repair and use them. And recover and repair our own, of course, to send them back into battle.
On the other hand, in situations where we won't be controlling the battlefield, we will need to actually blow up enemy vehicles to keep them from just being temporary losses.
Of course, even soft kills against the enemy are useful during the actual battle. I'm not saying that we shouldn't knock out enemy vehicles for even a short time in an effort to kill permanently fewer enemy vehicles. But in those cases we will need to focus assets on follow-up rocket or aerial attacks that seek out the damaged enemy vehicles in order to make them permanent losses with nice big explosions.
We call the Army the Green Machine. (Or at least we did when I was in.) How little did I know! Re-use and recycling of armored vehicles makes me feel very environmentally correct.
