Mech Platoon: CAB or ACR

[Pete]

When I attended OCS at Fort Benning in 1977-78 the Vu-Graph slides of the future "Infantry Fighting Vehicle" the instructors showed us looked just like what the Bradley later turned out to be. Later in 1982 at Camp Roberts, California (where my dad had trained in WW II) a team from the Bradley manufacturer, FMC Corporation, would fire the automatic gun on a Bradley into the impact area all day long Monday through Friday. They must have been doing some sort of Mean Rounds Between Failure testing--that's the only plausible explanation I can think of for the amount of ammo they were expending. Some of my forward observers had to ask the FMC guys to stop driving their tracked vehicles so fast past our bivouac area because they were raising huge clouds of dust that settled all over the campsite. A year later I took a tour of the FMC factory in San Jose and asked why the M548 cargo carrier was so unreliable. The answer I got was that it must be Army maintenance because they were perfect when they left the factory!