When speed, safety and supplies are at stake on land.
Armada International › Vol. 33 Nbr. 6, December 2009
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When speed, safety and supplies are at stake on land.
While most of the equipment used by special forces for insertion from the air and from sea is purpose-developed, the equipment for land operations is often a dedicated or modified version of existing gear. In conventional operations, SOF teams tend to operate deep behind enemy lines, as exemplified by the first Gulf War in 1991. However, in current operations, in which there is no clear battlefront, this is no longer always true.
Nowadays, special forces operations are more characterised by the type of mission they have to conduct rather than the distance from their base. Therefore some of the requirements that were high on the priority list in the past, such as the availability of air-transportability for specific vehicles, are now partly played down in favour of protection, as entire operations now tend to be carried out solely on land, without air insertion by rotary or fixed wing aircraft. This does not mean that light air-transportable vehicles will disappear from special forces inventories, but only that new and heavier vehicles are becoming the daily working tool for such units. Moving in Iraq and Afghanistan is a dangerous business due to the numerous roadside bombs used by the insurgents to deny mobility to coalition forces. Thus, special forces on mounted reconnaissance missions now tend to use protected vehicles rather than light, highly-mobile ones. However, it appears that an adequate balance between protection, mobility and situational awareness still needs to be found. Indeed, new versions of existing highly protected open vehicles are becoming available, but this clearly indicates a softer emphasis on protection in favour of situational awareness--not to mention firepower, which is maximised by the fact that all team members will not only be able to better observe but also open fire with their individual weapons (in a closed vehicle only the machine gun operator can...See the full content of this document
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