Thanks Ken,
Good comments. Sorry, I was away yesterday and these are good aspects to discuss, so shall speak to what I can of this.
Relative to the vehicle being high, this was a key interest of Special Ops in the urban setting in order to see over cars and have good situational awareness, which was also of interest relative to picking out IEDs or suspicious areas (where in the desert they were more interested in a keeping a low target profile on horizon).
Any design with height does need to pay good attention to stability and areas of operation. The JAKE concept we are speaking of here is in its “alley fighter” configuration for urban ops, so favors a compact package with maximum agility. There are traits of the unit’s suspension that address stability. One of the advantages of the modular design of this JAKE platform is that, for example, in re-supply configuration on tracks, this unit can traverse a 40 degree, and greater, side slopes. You can see this within the video on the website: http://www.americanagility.com/video...otsoldier.html In fact in the view of the track unit traveling away towards the end of the video, you can see that it is as you say, wider than it is tall. Its balancing features also provide interesting stability advances in going up grades and down.
What you speak of is one of the key problems that I have witnessed in working with the military, where all requirements get tossed on one vehicle, to where the vehicle does everything, and then nothing fully well. This is to the point that they get a unit that can drop into the water and cross the Mekong, yet in an alley, the soldier’s survivability is compromised by carrying all it takes for this capability that the soldier won't use in his total tour. Hence the JAKE’s modular approach, but any one configuration doesn’t meet all requirements (or the one that does, doesn’t provide the urban ops radical agility characteristics that is the reason the JAKE offers interesting opportunities). So here is a problem with the JAKE getting a program in the normal system.
Relative to your thoughts on resupply, the first interest in the JAKE is in carrying soldiers’ gear with them on patrol (mobile toobox), where today they are having to work further and further from their trucks (as the MRAPs get big). This lightens the soldier’s load, thus helping the soldiers’ own speed, agility and patrol endurance, thus survivability. On the use of ammo, if we are going to ask these soldiers to win this war, we have to have them with the training and discipline to execute. I have heard before the feeling that “too much ammo encourages promiscuous shooting”, but I have also heard that this was the reason that the Northern Army didn’t use the seven shot Springfield rifle in the first of the Civil War: fear that they would shoot too much and they were trained to stop and reload. Anyway, from conversations, I do not see just any soldier being a fighter JAKE operator, as I see these soldiers on fighter JAKEs having to be qualified just as today’s pilots. The upside on capabilities and firepower can be well worth efforts of study here.
Any vehicle is obviously a bigger target than a soldier. The trick is to get its size reduced as best possible and take the advantage that the soldier in it is more protected and more agile. Carriage of gear must be optimized for the missions. Modularity and varied racking help this, and our soldiers and their leadership are sharp and we can count on their adjusting well to the results they find in varied operations and threat levels and varied durations of patrol. The ready availability of medical evacuation is expressed often as high interest, enabling more of the team to stay in the fight. In urban patrol, a high interest in the JAKEs also comes from its next generation design being with hybrid diesel-electric drive so that there is an hour, or 3 mile, run quiet mode. This is good for speaking with civilians, for stealth operations, for redundancy, available electrical power and power generation. It may also offer advantages to be worked into tactics relative to reducing heat signature in certain operations.
The key, as you point out is to design and then evolve the design to the Soldier and the Marine and the way they find to use and expand capabilities. This will involve new concepts in maneuver and ratios of mounted and dismounted warriors and how they cover each other and also team with larger vehicles supporting operations. I have heard many comments like you have found, that this looks like it will give too much power to the Sergeants and Corporals, but I have also retired Marine Commandant, General A. M. Gray make the pitch at Quantico that we need something like the JAKE (that was standing in front of him) to use as an opportunity to open up what these young strategic Corporals and Sergeants can do. He states that they will think of 100 – 200 things we haven’t thought of…of course this is the reason for the conversation here on this thread: to get what head start we can.
So, I appreciate your insights and your obvious experience in the challenge of shifting the game. As most of the contributors of Small Wars Journal, and I would assume Small Wars Council members, are looking forward, writing on, and asking how we adapt to 4th and 5th GW warfare, there has to be courage taken if we are going to step equipment into this realm also. Of course, from other comments of yours on other threads, I sense you are of the same mind in getting something new and half intelligent into our young soldiers’ hands and see how they advance it. This is where stuff really starts happening.
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