The British Army pulls Bulldogs from Afghanistan

The Times of London reported today that the British Army will be withdrawing from service the 900 upgraded FV430-series armored troop carriers that it has received from BAE Systems and the Army Base Repair Organisation (ABRO) over the past three years. If this is true, it’s a sharp reversal of plans. Termed Bulldogs, the new FV430s came with a host of new features, including

• appliqué reactive armor (from Rafael) designed to repel hollow charge warheads such as those in RPG-7s,
• a new engine and steering gear for better speed, mobility, and maneuverability,
• air conditioning, which is considerably more important in south Asian deserts than on the north German plain, and
• a remotely-controlled 7.62 mm machine-gun mount

The problem, however, is that the upgrades couldn’t fix the FV430’s fundamental shortcoming: like its American analog, the M113, it’s an aluminum box with a flat bottom that sits about eighteen inches off the ground. As such, its shape traps blast gases from explosions (improvised or otherwise) underneath, allowing easy penetration of the hull at the expense of the occupants.

To be fair, the Pentagon did attempt something similar, two years before the British program started, at the urging of Congressman Ike Skelton's (D-Missouri). In December 2004, as roadside bombings were getting really alarming, he requested that the Army consider hanging more armor off those M113A3s that had been sent to Iraq. As Skelton wrote in his request,

        I understand that the M-113 may not provide the same level of protection as some other armored vehicles currently in use, but they certainly provide better protection than soft-skinned vehicles. Moreover, I believe that the M-113 chassis is robust enough to easily accommodate the additional weight of supplemental armor kits, whereas the HMMWV struggles under the burden and it is causing significant maintenance issues. As you know, broken-down up-armored HMMWVs provide no protection at all.

At the time, this seemed a more than reasonable idea, and by the end of 2005, a civil engineering squadron of the US Air Force (!) had upgraded more than 700 M113A3s at a disused factory in Iraq. Unfortunately, the effort didn’t quite pan out; despite all the extra armor, those M113s are hardly used now. In 2007, the US Congressional Budget Office checked mileage logs, and noted in its report that the M113s were clocking just one-tenth the monthly distance of MRAPs in-country, and one-twentieth that of Strykers. Troops logically prefer to ride in vehicles with steel hulls, more ground clearance, and ideally, v-shaped bottoms.

In consequence, I must say that I was a bit puzzled back in 2006 by the Ministry of Defense’s decision to upgrade the FV430s when the US record with the M113 had been so bad. As I noted in a related column last week, back in March 2004, one M113 (though admittedly a plain old A3 version) held up so poorly against a roadside bomb in Fallujah that the five guys inside all had to be buried in a single casket at Arlington. (See Eric M. Weiss, "5 U.S. soldiers, 2 from Texas, buried as group in Arlington," Washington Post, 19 June 2004.) To follow Congressman’s Skelton’s argument, while upgrading all those FV430s would probably have been better than doing nothing, it certainly wasn’t better than ordering more MRAPs faster, as the program absorbed cash that could have gone to better use. What’s embarrassing is that the MRAP concept was more than proven by that point—as if it hadn’t been proven in South Africa in the 1970s. So, it’s really not clear what the MoD was thinking.

Trying to shed some light on this, the Times reported that a spokesman for the ministry asserted that the vehicles really had been usefully employed, as they were procured for service in Iraq, but were just fairing less well on service in Afghanistan. This is a highly suspect explanation: the roadside bomb threat developed earlier in Iraq, where roads also happened to be much better. Faced with these differing environmental profiles and threat assessments, one would naturally have sent the flat-bottomed, aluminum-hulled, tracked vehicle to Afghanistan, not Iraq. The same MoD spokesman further insisted that all was not lost, as the Bulldogs would now be used for training exercises at British Army facilities in the UK and Canada. This follows an earlier assertion that the BvS10 Vikings withdrawn from Afghanistan—similarly out of vulnerability to mines—would be used for training in the UK. Someone might tell these mandarins not to take us all for fools: Bulldogs and Vikings have awfully high operating costs to be confined to parading about the Salisbury Plan or the BATUS. Surplus sale is far more likely at this point.

It’s hard not to observe that both the Bulldog and the M113A3 are built by BAE Systems Land & Armaments. That’s unfortunate, as it’s a great company with some impressive products, like the RG33, the FMTV (for now), and even the BvS10. That’s right: in another war, against a different enemy, the Bulldog or the Viking might excel at its task. The trouble is that the enemy gets a vote, and over the past few years, the Ba’athists, the Al-Qaedists, and the Taliban have come to prefer mines. Withdrawal of otherwise admirable vehicles as these could very well be the death-knell of flat-bottomed troop carriers throughout NATO. Existing inventories will persist for some time, but the implications for new programs, from the US Army’s Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) to the US Marine Corps’s Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle (EFV), could be dramatic. If the preceding Manned Ground Vehicle (MGV) project couldn’t proceed with its boxy design concept, it’s hard to imagine how the GCV or EFV could. And the implications for that shift extend across the industry.

Comments

[Geoff]

While the UK and USA experimented with light vehicle designs such as FCS MGV which was conceptualized at 16-18 metric tonnes and quickly increased to a higher figure under 30 tonnes, Germany went ahead in the same time period and developed their new PUMA IFV at a weight of 43 tonnes which would no doubt have weighed closer to 45-46 tonnes if it was not originally intended to fly (light) in the new A400M aircraft.

Given the modern mine threat, with FCS MCV cancelled due to a realisation that such lightly armoured vehicles would be inappropriate, its apparent forth coming replacement the US GCV would seem to need to have a vehicle weight closer to the German Puma, perhaps heavier depending on U.S. crew numbers in a similar IFV role. Not surprising given the constraints of the ‘laws of physics’ and threat.

This begs an interesting question whether the new UK FRES scout fleet will be closer to 30+ metric tonnes or closer to 40+ metric tonnes. The German PUMA may indeed be near the ideal weight (at 43 tonnes) for the needs of ‘todays’ modern combat but perhaps even heavier is required in the future as yet to be envisaged and escalating threats to the soldiers life emerge.