In this month’s Armed Forces Journal (“Rebuilding the Army—again: Lessons and warnings from the post-Vietnam era,” March 2013, p. 11), Robert Killebrew writes that
If an Army planner had been asked in 1913 what the service would have to look like in 1950, he probably would have said something like: “At least three divisions, one strong regiment to protect the Panama Canal and one in the Philippines. And, by the way, as many as a hundred airplanes.”
So we can all agree that prediction is hard, and especially about the future. One thing that does seem clear is that the future for the Army from here does not so much include the Bradley fighting vehicle. In a speech at the CSIS today, General H.R. McMaster, the commander of the armor center at Fort Knox, called the Bradley "soon past its usefulness”. As my friend Byron Callan related from the event, McMaster particularly assailed the Bradley for its low ground clearance, which makes it vulnerable to mines, and its need for a bigger, longer-range gun. He also believes that its signature lends it vulnerability to anti-tank missiles. Whatever the reality of its usefulness, the reality of the marketing problem is clear: the Army is just not enamored of that vehicle.
The Army’s affection for the related Abrams tank is greater, but the United States still has massive overages of both that vehicle and the Bradley. The Army, National Guard, and Marine Corps keep about 2,000 Abrams in their force structure, but have 8,000 in inventory. Similarly, the Army and the Guard need perhaps 3,000 Bradleys, but have about 6,000. That’s 9,000 more tracked armored vehicles than the US can use presently. The Marines clearly have no further interest in tanks for decades, and the Army has at least said, through its budget submissions to the Congress, that it wants to take a three-year hiatus from buying new versions of either vehicle.
Thus, as Inside Defense reported yesterday, BAE Systems has a problem. The company
is sounding the alarm to protect [its] production facility in York, Pennsylvania after private conversations with the Army did not yield assurances that the service would maintain the combat vehicle industrial base through increased spending, according to company officials. (19 March 2013)
That’s putting it mildly. National Defense magazine is also looking at this issue in depth this month, in Sandra Erwin’s article “Battle Brewing Over Proposed Shutdown of BAE’s Armored Vehicle Plant”, and the Lexington Institute is making the case for the factory as well. “It takes three years to train a ballistic welder,” Loren Thompson further wrote in Forbes this month, effectively saying that a three-year restart isn’t possible if the plant shuts down for three years. I’ll have more on that assessment at the end, but for now, just note that it’s unlikely that the staff will just take to woods and forage for food until the contracts flow again. They’re skilled technicians, and manufacturing is experiencing a minor renaissance in the United States, or so the story goes.
The same battle is underway, of course, regarding General Dynamics’ leased plant in Lima, Ohio where it remanufactures old Abrams tanks into new ones. GD can partly fill the factory in the interim with Israeli orders for Namer armored troop carriers, but BAE Systems does not so much have this option. There’s no vigorous global market for armored howitzers or recovery vehicles (BAE is also redoing Paladins and Hercules at the site), and worse, the likelihood of exporting Bradleys is very low. The vehicle has won only one foreign order, and that was to Saudi Arabia, which has a record of buying its land forces equipment exclusively from suppliers in the United States. The Bradley’s primary competition in that market, incidentally, is the Swedish-built CV90, now in service in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. It’s also widely considered the favored candidate in the pending Close Combat Vehicle competition in Canada. The video that Hägglunds released after the competition in Norway is definitely worth watching: at 1:25 the Bradley gets stuck in the snow; at about 2:33 the crew of the CV90 wave to the camera as they drive past.
Of course, as the CV90 is built by another subsidiary of BAE Systems, Hägglunds, the finance guys in London probably don’t care whence the orders come. And indeed, they should not. BAE has become in the past few years a remarkably unsentimental company, and rather like GD in that regard. That its US CEO and several of her top lieutenants are GD alumni is indeed telling. So no one should expect that BAE would keep that factory in York open in the absence of orders. This is very bad for my friends in Pennsylvania (and I do know people at the plant), so I think that it’s worth considering what the Army might be thinking.
In the case of the Abrams, the Army claims that it wants to start buying an M1A3 version of the tank in a few years, and thus would support a restart of production. Analytically, there are two problems with trusting the service in that regard, even if those “assurances” had been forthcoming. The first is that the current Abrams tanks may be gas-guzzling monsters and all that, but they’re really, really effective on open battlefields. It’s hardly clear what competing project is about to produce a tank that would exceed its capabilities. KMW’s Leopard 2 (now in its A7 version) is an excellent machine and does sell better around the world, but it’s obviously not being exported to Iran. So the threat worthy of another round of development is just missing.
Second, while the Army will still need to undertake depot-level resets of Abrams, those are already partially accomplished at its Anniston Army Depot in Alabama. The tear-down process is largely accomplished there; reassembly is largely accomplished at Lima. But rather than shipping stripped-and-cleaned parts by rail across four states, what if the Army consolidated those operations at a single site? Anniston is already in the armored vehicle manufacturing business: along with London, Ontario and Ladson, South Carolina, it’s one of three sites where Strykers are built.
Those facilities are probably not sufficient to assemble new Abrams from scratch, as Lima can theoretically do at 60 per month. But in what war would the United States need to build new tanks at that pace, when it already has an excess inventory of 6,000 vehicles? That count is enough to equip 100 new mechanized brigades, which is probably enough to invade China, even if getting involved in a massive land war in Asia is indeed one of the classic blunders of all time. More to the point, just raising those troops would take years, as it did in the Second World War. So building a whole new production line would not be the limiting factor, even in that crazy scenario.
Lima’s new-vehicle production capacity is thus thoroughly irrelevant. Given the large inventories of Bradleys and also Strykers on hand, York’s theoretical new-vehicle production capacity is almost as irrelevant. This is particularly so because the Army simply wants largely to get away from that vehicle anyway. Whatever the final form of its Ground Combat Vehicle (GCV) program, as I have been told by people close to the program, a remanufactured Bradley is simply not a serious option for the infantry fighting vehicle requirement. Whether the M3A3 Bradley remains the Army’s cavalry fighting vehicle is another question, but every GCV produced will reduced by one the number of Bradleys required for any role. Turretless Bradleys could be used to replace M113s in some roles in the Army’s Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) program, but the hulls would similarly come from existing stocks at Texarkana’s Red River Army Depot, and York is hardly the only site in North America where these conversion could be accomplished.
Just where that GCV factory will find itself is, of course, some years away from a decision. And indeed, that site also need not be York or Lima. GD had planned to assemble its Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle in Woodbridge, Virginia. BAE Systems had planned a greenfield factory in Elgin, Oklahoma for its Crusader howitzer, and mostly just to please artillery enthusiast Senator Jim Inhofe. During the Future Combat System (FCS) program, which was admittedly disastrously conceived, the Army Department had the notion that all FCS production—replacing all Abrams, Bradleys, Paladins, and M113s—would be undertaken at a single site. Just where this was to be was never made completely clear, but some folks I knew in the industry at the time speculated that the service preferred that be Anniston. Having (unsuccessfully) put Red River on the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) list, the Army seemed content to neck down to a single site for pretty much everything. Production would then be collocated with depot support, with assembly and engineering talent flexibly floating between programs and stages of programs, as it does in other geographic industry clusters.
For all these reasons, I wonder if the Army would be happy to see York and Lima close permanently, to finally kill Red River in the next BRAC round, and thus to thoroughly rationalize the final stage of its armored vehicle industrial base. The Army recently took delivery of a ginormous report from consultant A.T. Kearney on the state of that industrial base, and I am indeed wondering what’s in there. So if you all in the Army Department get a FOIA request, you’ll know why.
Now, at some point in the future, it’s just imaginable that the Army and the Marine Corps will want to buy some wholly new armored vehicles that aren’t made in Ontario or South Carolina. They may even want some tracked ones again. Without Lima and York, we may be told, this will be impossible.
Not hardly. Even if the facts of the greenfield sites weren’t damning enough, from more dramatic historical precedent, we know much better. As I wrote just the other day, the United States Navy once took a fifteen-year break, from 1922 through 1937, from buying battleships. Fourteen-inch naval rifles and 35,000-ton armored ships are arguably a lot harder to figure out how to build than tanks. And somehow, when the New York Naval Yard got the order for USS North Carolina on 1 August 1937, the keel got laid 26 days later, and the ship was launched just 30 months after that. The Washington Naval Treaty limited the size of cruisers to 10,000 tons, so nothing even a third as large had been attempted at the yard in fifteen years. And still, the ship was in commission before Pearl Harbor, which was handy for replacing the losses.
If that’s not enough, just consider (as I do frequently!) the MRAP program. If ballistic welders take three years to train, then how could Navistar and Oshkosh have started their armored vehicle lines so quickly? I don’t know how much better a ballistic welder with three years experience is than one with three months experience, but I strongly doubt that the required length of training really rivals that of a medical residency. Simply put, as my other friend Steve Grundman told National Defense for that article this month, “capabilities are a lot easier to reconstitute than we give them credit for. We generally underestimate the capacity of a vibrant economy to reconstitute industrial capabilities.” As with battleships. Or MRAPs.
So what does this mean for the folks in Lima and York? On the surface, it leaves them in a world of hurt. The Army doesn’t absolutely need their locations; it’s merely possible that they’re more useful than the next-best alternatives. If they really wanted to keep their businesses alive and where they are, those two divisions would need something better than scary stories. They would need to argue to the Army Department (don’t even both making this case to the Navy Department) that two, multi-site final assembly enterprises are more cost-effective in the long run than a single, consolidated government-owned site with (possibly) multiple hosted contractors. They would need to account for the probable force structure reductions, consequent unreplaced reductions in armored vehicle inventories, and retirements by cohort in their relatively aged work forces. They would need to show that whatever A.T. Kearney told the Army, there’s a stronger case to be made. And it is their case to make, strenuously, for the Army seems to have already chosen its officer in this play.
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