Infantry survivability - at the crossroads?

[VMI_Marine]

Read your earlier post. If one has to have Armor, then I agree with your approach. Since I'm not the Emperor, I guess we'll have Armor but I'm not a fan. I fully understand what it is and what it does and I do agree with it in an Iraq-like situation; I agree less with it for dismounted troops in Afghanistan. As I said above, if we end up in a jungle somewhere, there will be no armor worn (not after the first few weeks of heat casualties anyway). Individual armor impedes troop mobility, in some situations, the benefit is worth it, in others it will not be. METT-TC again...

Ken, I couldn't agree with you more. Even within Iraq, different situations require different levels of protection. In Ramadi, summer 2006 timeframe, wearing an MTV with ESAPIs and ESBIs makes a fair amount of sense. In rural Habbaniyah, trying to keep up with IA patrols in 120° heat, it made no sense at all. GOs have completely removed the ability of company grade officers to make those kinds of decisions, which goes with your second point below.

I also agree with you on the entrenching tool but I submit two thoughts for consideration:

- The US does not defend well; we are very poor at it. We don't dig well, partly because we can't do it in training at home station due to environmental constraints (unlikely to change for the better) and partly because you have to almost beat Americans to get them to dig. Recall that every memorable British battle is a defensive one; virtually every one of ours is an attack. The upshot of all that is one thing and you can add that the days when the defense offered advantages are, I think going or gone. If you're static you can be made dead too easily. Sometimes a limited defense cannot be helped but it should be avoided by us if possible.

- Initiative and agility are tenets of our doctrine; yet we go out of our way to stifle the former and impede the latter with too much stuff and nonsense.

We really need to change that latter problem to preclude the former one.

I agree that we don't do defensive ops well, but I don't know that the advantages of the defense are gone. Also, I'm not talking about long-term field fortifications for a static defense, I'm talking about digging in when forced to go static for short periods of time. My company commander had us dig everytime we stopped in OIF I. Even a shallow hole provides better frag protection than leg armor.

Firefights (direct fire) produce lots of fragments - 40mm, rifle grenades, hand grenades, recoilless weapons, spalling cover. Anti-frag is not only indirect fires.
Light infantry depends on its leg mobility - a perforated leg is a real problem on patrol or when attempting to break contact.

Agreed that leg mobility is very important - but providing infantrymen with leg protection will make them no longer "light" infantry, and will reduce their mobility to the point where you might as well treat them as heavy infantry. I don't believe the current state of body armor technology is capable of producing frag-resistant chaps that will not be a significant impediment to mobility.