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A new breed.
As explained in the opening page of this Compendium, setting the parameters to call an armoured vehicle 'light' is not an easy task. The increasing protection requirements are inexorably moving the needle of the scale to the right for vehicles that originally targeted a gross weight of five to six tonnes, but with severe limitations on mobility, which often call for a ground-up redesign.
Paolo Valpolini, inputs from Eric H. Biass Indeed, and more often than not, mobility considerations have brought the seemingly endless increase of weight and dimensions to a halt. The considerable difference between the Afghan terrain, with valleys and narrow tracks, and that of Iraq, with its wide desert tracks, for example, has compelled the US Army to revise its policy towards Mrap vehicles, leading to the Mrap-All Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV), with the aim of packing a similar protection level into a smaller, more agile vehicle that could ensure full mobility to its troops in Afghanistan. However, in the asymmetrical type of conflicts that now seem to prevail, opponents have no standards: if they realise that a makeshift bomb is not powerful enough, they will put two or more side-by-side to send even main battle tanks toppling over (as has happened). Thus, never by any stretch of imagination will the best armour ever be able to defy the laws of physics. At the most, what armour and internal vehicle layout can do today is limit the damage. The only alternative, or rather additional, solution is to limit vehicle exposure through improved intelligence and sensors, but that is a different story. Splitting wheeled vehicles into three categories, light, Mrap and heavy, it seems safe to heighten the limit between the first two at around eleven tonnes. Many of the vehicles born as 'light' are evolving towards that limit, some new ones are appearing at 7.5 tonnes with growth potential, therefore one can assume that today's 'light' is about the double of the original weight of many vehicles of this category. The JLTV Affair The major fight armoured vehicle programme currently in the pipeline, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle currently in the technology development phase, is clearly not exempt from risks of cuts and rethinking. The programme should lead to a part replacement of the Humvee fleet currently in service with the US Army and the Marines, but Australia is also taking part in the technology development phase in which it invested 40 million Australian dollars ([euro]28.3 million). The interest shown by India for the JLTV programme in late 2009, which would have led to a wider internationalisation of the programme, did not materialise. To align its fleet of LTVs the US Army aims at replacing front line Humvees with JLTVs, while current armoured Humvees such as the M1114 and M1151s, most of which will be upgraded, would replace the unarmoured M998, M1025 and M1026 Humvee series. In other words, the entire programme should bring about the 'recapitalisation' of some 50,000 Humvees and the replacement of a similar number by the JLTV. The US Marine Corps should acquire about 5500 JLTVs and maintain in service a fleet of some 20,000 Humvees. However, at AUSA 2010 some doubts started to emerge about the sustainability of the JLTV programme as it was initially conceived. Army sources confirmed the service's commitment to the programme, however the purchase might be slowed down and the concerned Humvees probably not replaced on a one-for-one basis. As for the Marines, doubts on the vehicle's gross weight seem to emerge every now and then, resulting from the different priorities set by the two US services, the army looking at survivability while the US Marine Corps, by definition focused on expeditionary force capability, l...See the full content of this document
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