Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
First, we need to define exactly what 'light' Infantry happens to be. To me, the word light means just that. They are lightly equipped to include few to no assigned vehicles and are more highly trained than normal infantry. They are expected to be foot or opportunity mobile. They are incapable of extended operations and their use is conjunction with Armor should be extremely rare. A US example would be airborne units and the former 7th Inf Div (and not the Tenth Mountain Division which is a hybrid)
Since the utility of pure, un-augmented light infantry seems to be rather limited. Perhaps we need to look at reconstituting most of them as "just plain infantry" units. I realize we are doing this, to some extent, with the Stryker brigades, but even these are "deployability challenged", fairly expensive, and not suited to certain types of conflicts (e.g. Afghanistan).

Maybe we need to look at a TOE that mounts most or all "light" infantry on HMMWVs or trucks.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/m...g=content;col1
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc...f&AD=ADA339420
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc...c=GetTRDoc.pdf

The resulting organization would train to fight dismounted, but also have organic vehicular mobility. HMMWVs are much lighter and cheaper than Strykers, and have more utility as logistics platforms.