Nearly 200 M1A2 SEP V2 Abrams Tanks and M2A3 Bradley Fighting Vehicles were delivered to the Soldiers of the Big Red One's 2nd Heavy Brigade Combat Team earlier this month. The new equipment features the Army's latest round of updates that allow operators better situational awareness and superior optics over previous versions.
"The greatest thing about the new vehicles is that the entire brigade will have the newest equipment the Army has to offer," said Lt. Col. John Cross, commander, 1st Combined Arms Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, 2nd HBCT. "With our new fleet, the 'Dagger' Brigade will be equipped to be the most lethal maneuver brigade in the U.S. Army."
The brigade will continue training in this new (as in updated) equipment.
Twenty thousand other armored vehicles designed for surviving large IEDs and mines in the Iraq and Afghanistan counter-insurgency campaigns--Mine Resistant Ambush Protected, or MRAPs--are being sorted out:
Approximately 11,000 MRAPs will be put into these brigade combat team contingency sets prepositioned around the world, comprising 59 percent of the entire fleet. Another 7,000 MRAPs “will go into [pre-deployment] Army units like transportation companies and echelon above brigade medical,” he wrote. About 2,000 of those 7,000 will be placed in training sets around the world while the last 800 or so “will be used for Army war reserve sustainment stocks and contingency replacement stocks.”
MRAPs were great for their specialized mission but are less than ideal for a rebalanced Army that isn't fighting a counter-insurgency or routine peacetime training and missions. I don't mind the $50 billion spent on them. We saved a lot of lives--dead and injured--with that expenditure. But we won't just junk them. The contingency sets will allow a unit equipped for conventional warfare that is being sent to a counter-insurgency environment to draw a set of MRAPs and carry out the new mission with appropriate equipment. Some will go to units that would heavily use roads and be expected to encounter roadside bombs as the primary threat. Route clearance and engineer units would use them, as well as the medical units noted above. Some will be used for training and some will be replacements for losses. Apparently, only a small number won't be retained in one way or another.
Which is fine. If our Army retains the knowledge of fighting insurgents in doctrine that our officer corps can implement, well-trained troops can adapt quickly from conventional operations to counter-insurgency operations.
But our ability to flip has a lot of momentum behind it from recent war experience. Will this capability last more than a generation as the left-over MRAPs wear out and as the officers with direct experience in fighting insurgents leave the surface? Hopefully, we do institutionalize this knowledge even as we rebalance to fight conventional enemies in the field.
Guidance from the top may tell our Army that it won't have to fight something like Iraq again, but reality has a way of dictating who we have to fight rather than guidance from above reality.
