Quote Originally Posted by Sabre View Post
The US Army uses the word "deployability", in roughly the same way a panic-stricken student says that he/she needs to "study" the night before a big exam. Plenty of talk, and disjointed, but all too brief, spurts of action
Agreed. However, on this, I'm not so sure:
Most of all, our rapid deployment forces (light infantry and SOF) too often seem to eschew armor to the point of a fetish...
Agree on SOF but the Airplane Division -- there's only one and I'm not familiar enough with the 10th and 101st to comment on their attitude -- would love to have an air droppable something. The M8 (which was not a very good vehicle but would have been better than nothing) got sacrificed by the Infantry in order to get Armor to agree to the Bradley (bad trade IMO but they didn't ask me) and Infantry to in turn agree to the M1 so Armor could have the HEMTT (which the AC of USAIS did not want for strange reasons). Equipment buys are so simple...

Anyway, what the light guys are not enamored of is Mech Infantry -- it's an attitude thing; Tanks are acceptable and Cav is cool...
And yet, (after the Sheridan) there was never a US counterpart to the BMD or Wiesel, the more compact French armored cars, or even the Scorpion /Scimitar. Seriously?
True and a major flaw on our part; as you said,"Were we serious, we would have come up with something (and actually deployed it)."
The M1, with a few improvements (more fuel efficient engine, for example - not too hard to do) could make it less difficult to support - and thus more useful in an austere environment. Usually, we either seem to have the time, or make the time, to get some heavy armor into theater anyway. ...and an M1 can give you a very nice... edge.
True. whatever happened to the the LV 100-5? Though I'd opt for an MTU 890 series if it were my call ...
We also seem to lead with our Cav organizations (both Gulf Wars) and they ended up doing a good bit of fighting. Heh, historically, armored scouts always end up fighting, no matter how often some say they shouldn't.
Training design flaw, IMO. In NW Europe at the end of WW II, the Recon Sqns and Troops which had been snooping all across Western Europe and doing it well suddenly hit the north German plain and a crumbling German Army -- that led to pressure for speed so they learned to just charge ahead and get into fights. That 'lesson' stuck and as an old Cav Colonel said not long ago, "we don't have the patience to do stealthy recon; so we just go out looking for trouble" lot of truth in that and if you do that, you have to have Armor -- so our Recon unit design defaults to NW Europe. Still. Wrongly. Very wrongly. We haven't done any real recon work there for almost 20 years...

The issue is not that the Scouts don't have the patience to snoop, that can be trained -- the problem is that the Commanders in the rear do not want to give the Scouts time to do that. That's where the impatience is a problem.
...the DivCav Squadrons that were so excellent, have now been dismantled, and the HBCT Cav Squadron certainly couldn't mix it up the way the DivCav could (in spite of the fact that the Heavy BCT's desperately need more combat power). Quite ironic that we nearly dismantled all of the Cav organizations, in the name of "modularity".
Very true and very bad mistakes. I'm not a proponent of Scouts mixing it up but acknowledge they may have to and for over 50 years, I've been waiting for a good US Army Scout vehicle. I've seen five attempts but no vehicle...