Less body armor might be the answer in Afghanistan

[Guy]

However, I believe the newest batch of young studs who are currently scampering all over the place with this crap on, will suffer similar physical problems but in a significantly shorter time frame.

In the long term, this will cost the USG even more $$$$$ in health care for veterans...

Stay safe.

[Blitzzz (RIP)]

Just to add to Team Sergeant's "carpet Bombing" I say yes with MOABs. Blitzzz

[Pete]

Originally Posted by SF718

......Hey you, with the facial hair and trousers unbloused, what unit you with, hey get back here, Dont make me run!

I digress.

As I say, don't call 'um out unless you can chase them down or at least know where they sleep.


Aaaannnd take a quick look down the front of your uniform just to make sure you don't have something on wrong or missing the camp commanders latest addition to the camp uniform.

Funny how thinking something didn't apply to them goes up as well as down. Sometimes it's fun to play with CSMs - but you better have your shit straight when you do.

[Richard]

Hey you, with the facial hair and trousers unbloused, what unit you with, hey get back here, Dont make me run!

Some things never change. I showed up at the C-Team for mail and medical supplies one day and the CSM caught me in relaxed standards - sent me off to the NCO Academy at Samae San to teach me a lesson - lived in luxury for a week with soft bed, clean linens, movies, rec center, beach, swimming pool, bowling alley, library, hot shower - pure punishment - I came back Honor Grad and was glad to get back to camp - taught me that I had made the right decision to (1) stay away from the regular Army and (2) to avoid anybody above the B-Team level looking for something to do with themselves.

Richard's $.02

[futureSoldier]

To make matters worse for the conventional side... when we touch down in Afghanistan this summer we will be wearing Land Warrior with its 8lbs and very restrictive wires.

[The Reaper]

"War is hell and there is no point in trying to civilize it."

W.T. Sherman

[18C4V]

Originally Posted by Max_Tab

This one is an easy fix. Let the soldier decide what he want's to wear. If something happens he still get's full benefit's, but in the end it was his decision.

That would never happen, too many officer's and NCO's like uniformity too much, but it would solve all the problems.

LOL,
You know that will never fly!!!!.

[18C4V]

Originally Posted by TOMAHAWK9521

As touched on in the article, another consequence of wearing all this junk is the long-term health issues. After 22 years of RGR/SF I am being medically retired for spinal damage and cartilage ground off of my knees. Some might say that after that much time, what would one expect? I'm an old guy by army standards, right? However, I believe the newest batch of young studs who are currently scampering all over the place with this crap on, will suffer similar physical problems but in a significantly shorter time frame.

Great post.

Sorry to hear about you being medically retired.

Can I have your Thailand JCET?

[Peregrino]

Originally Posted by 18C4V

Can I have your Thailand JCET?

Now that is just plain COLD!

[TOMAHAWK9521]

Originally Posted by 18C4V

Great post.

Sorry to hear about you being medically retired.

Can I have your Thailand JCET?

Sure. Then again, I wasn't slated for that one. My team, which I have had to give up, is going to Czech Republic.

[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by Max_Tab

This one is an easy fix. Let the soldier decide what he want's to wear. If something happens he still get's full benefit's, but in the end it was his decision. That would never happen, too many officer's and NCO's like uniformity too much, but it would solve all the problems.

All they have do is sign a libility waiver and bring a permission slip signed by NOK.

[Dozer523]

Originally Posted by SF718

What effect would that have on his SGLI?

I guess it would depend on the mood of the Line Of Duty Investigating Officer.
I think we are stuck with Body Armor.

[Dozer523]

This off AKO this morning. "Wily, Mobile" sounds good for us too.McClatchy Newspapers (mcclatchydc.com)
March 23, 2009

U.S. Troops Confront Disciplined, Wily, Mobile Afghan Insurgents

By Philip Smucker, McClatchy Newspapers

ASMAR, Afghanistan — When the young American lieutenant and his 14 soldiers glanced up at the rock face, they thought that the major who'd planned the mission must have been kidding.
Elijah Carlson, a strapping, blue-eyed Southern Californian and a self-proclaimed "gun nut," gripped the crumbling rock, tugged backward by 90-pounds of ammunition and gear. "If we fall back, we are dead!" he whispered to Lt. Jake Kerr, the platoon leader.
In seconds, a rock shot loose beneath one soldier's boot and dropped 20 feet onto another soldier below, sending him tumbling 15 feet to the base and cracking his bulletproof side plate.
What transpired over the next 16 hours was the kind of clash that's led Kerr's commanders in the Army's 10th Mountain Division, based at Fort Drum, N.Y., to conclude that there's no "victory" waiting around the next bend in Afghanistan, only a relentless struggle with a fleet-footed, clever enemy. For Kerr, a recent West Point graduate who specialized in counterinsurgency, it was the first face-off with an often-elusive opponent and a case study in the complex politics of rural Afghanistan.
Kunar, where Combat Company of the 1st Battalion of the 10th Mountain Division's 32nd Infantry Regiment is stationed, is one of the most violent provinces in Afghanistan. Asmar is just 10 miles from the border with Pakistan's Bajaur Tribal Agency, which has been a sanctuary for al Qaida and Afghan Taliban leaders.
The mission was to disrupt the men and weapons infiltrating from Pakistan and root out their staging bases in Afghanistan. The Americans had hoped first to confer with village elders, but after intelligence indicated that insurgents were in the area, they moved in with heavy machine guns.
Kerr's platoon moved for three hours in the darkness. Each time they thought they'd reached the peak, the land shot up farther. The unit came across enemy fighting positions, piled high with rocks and littered with food wrappers.

Afghan and American intelligence reports said these were "Bakt Ali's men," insurgents who lay claim to nearby villages in central Kunar. Ali is a senior Taliban guerrilla leader in Kunar who's thought to have direct ties to Abu Ikhlas al Masri, an Egyptian al Qaida leader in Pakistan. At each dug-in position, Kerr recorded the GPS coordinates of unmanned enemy positions, down to the 10th digit.
As dawn broke over the rocks, company commander Maj. Andy Knight, of Ann Arbor, Mich., set out on foot in the valley 700 feet below. Kerr would provide support from his eagles' nests as Knight attempted to clear two villages where, he said, residents had complained of insurgent intimidation. Accompanied by a reporter, Knight and a detachment of American and 14 Afghan soldiers stepped carefully along mud dikes, greeting Afghan children and their parents with a cordial "Sengay?" — "How are you?"
What Kerr, from Lake Placid, N.Y., heard from his perch above the valley was a surprise: Unseen men along the valley floor were shouting to one another like an oral tag team, passing the news that "the Americans have arrived."
Within minutes, three men, one in a white shalwar kamis — a loose pajama-like shirt and pants — another in a black one and a third in a brown shawl and gray pants, sprinted down the valley from the west with machine guns toward Knight's patrol, which was walking along a dry, rocky streambed about 1,000 feet away.
Kerr, 25, part of a new generation of American warriors schooled at West Point in the raw lessons of fighting counterinsurgencies in the Islamic world, spotted them instantly.
"They were running at Major Knight with AK-47s," Kerr said after the battle. "We opened up on them, and they began firing. But we had the three men outgunned, and they dove for cover in the streambed."
In the valley, the hiking party splashed through irrigation channels and dove for cover amid tall bushes that lined the stream. The chatter of machine guns fired from both sides echoed off the ridges and stone walls.
Knight, who played tight end on the Army football team, shot past in a blur to the front of the marching party. He didn't yet know that two of the insurgents had been hit. They were pulling themselves on their bellies through the rocks, desperate to reach a bend in the stream.
Within five minutes, two Apache attack helicopters buzzed the valley, scanning for enemy positions and listening to Kerr direct them to the target. "I was shooting tracers down at the two fighters crawling in the stream, and the other man in a brown shawl was shooting back," Kerr said.
Hidden behind a wooden shack, Knight's party could see the two Apaches sweep down, ripping up the stream bed. The insurgents had slipped just out of Kerr's sight, however, back up a bend in the stream and away from Knight's party. When the Apaches unleashed their Hellfire missiles, the men already had vanished.
"Dawg 1,6!" Knight snapped into his radio to Lt. David Poe, 24, of Buffalo, N.Y., a few hundred yards away, as he crouched in the rocks. "Are you near the woman in the green dress, tending to the animals? We are moving towards your location."
Almost all the males in the valley had gone missing, but Afghan women were trying to keep spooked cows and goats from fleeing. As Knight's party climbed into the rocks above the stream and dashed along the mountainside, a woman in a black shawl appeared, waving her arms and wailing, berating U.S. and Afghan forces as they passed. An Afghan soldier shouted back, incorrectly, "Back in your house, lady! They shot first!"
Knight stopped to catch his breath. "Do we have maps of these villages?" he demanded of Lt. Eric Forcey, 23, of Lynchburg, Va., who was at his side.
"No, sir," Forcey replied. "For all intents and purposes, they do not exist."
"I think they've existed for a long time, Forcey; the mapmakers just have not found them," the major replied.
"Yes, sir."
WIth "shhh-thwamps, shhh-thwamps," two more Hellfire missiles crashed into the rocks.
With constant translations of the enemy radio chatter in Pashtu, picked up through electronic eavesdropping, and the major's narration of the battle, events appeared to turn. "I think one of them is badly injured," Knight speculated. "They will have to make a decision to drag him out or leave him."

The U.S. forces, augmented by the 14 Afghans, were deliberate, at times cumbersome. From above, Kerr's men heard radio traffic indicating that the insurgents had slipped into a larger village farther up the ravine.
Enemy radio chatter also indicated that the helicopter strikes were landing just in front of the house from which Bakt Ali's men apparently were talking.
Still, this was a shell game with no certainty about the targets' whereabouts, and Knight — who spent a year in Kunar in 2006 and 2007 — knew it. He refused to order an airstrike on the suspected hideout.
Instead, he took Kerr's plea over the radio that, "We can own this valley, sir!" He ordered two Humvees to rush up the stream bed and take up "support-by-fire" positions in front of a group of wooden houses and dispatched Dawg Company's Poe to oversee a group of Afghan commandos, who'd search the village on foot.
The choppers returned from refueling. Once in the village, the Afghan soldiers went house to house, room by room. A cluster of women and children stood on a rooftop. "This is a virtual ghost town, sir," came Poe's report. An Afghan interpreter sniped: "It almost always ends this way."
Kerr and his men were tired and frustrated. No one had found the fugitives' "blood trails," which he'd hoped to follow.
As his men packed in their heavy weapons and began to pull back down the mountain, the insurgents' radio traffic intensified.
"We could hear them actually counting our numbers, and they were saying that they would hit us. A commander told them to wait until we were grouped." The insurgents apparently wanted to target only the departing forces and to avoid destroying the village.
Kerr's team hiked back down the ridgeline, descended about 1,000 feet into the riverbed, linked up with Knight's fighters in U.S. jeeps and reached for water bottles.
Suddenly, an Afghan interpreter, monitoring radio traffic, heard Bakt Ali's commander order the attack. Kerr dove for cover. The pavement exploded with rocket blasts and fire from massive PK machine guns. Carlson, 23, from Torrance, Calif., dropped to his knees, curling into a fetal position under a dirt ledge with his machine gun trained on the crest of the mountain he'd scaled earlier. One U.S. soldier was hit in the groin as he leapt for cover.
Kerr's platoon's work was about to pay dividends, however.
With a rush of satisfaction, Kerr reached into his pocket and pulled out the GPS coordinates of the enemy positions he'd scribbled down that morning. From six miles away at their base in Asmar, a 10th Mountain artillery battery unleashed a torrent of 105 mm howitzer shells onto the enemy positions. In the twilight, .50-caliber machine guns blazed.
The day was over. No one was going back to hunt for the living or the dead. The insurgents had lost fighters, but they'd proved to be a wily, disciplined and mobile force.
The U.S. and Afghan forces had had a reality check. If they didn't already know it, they now understood why they'd been unable to have a peaceful discussion with the village elders. Bakt Ali's forces owned the villages, and until last Thursday, they more or less controlled the entire ravine. It would take more than better maps for the Afghan army and its U.S. allies to wrest control of them.

Smucker is a McClatchy special correspondent.

[Richard]

And then we have this...

And so it goes.

Richard's $.02

Lightweight Armor Is Slow to Reach the War Zone
Thom shanker, NYT, 17 apr 2009

The Army has promised to lighten the soldier’s load, and nowhere more urgently than in eastern Afghanistan, where the unforgiving terrain tests the stamina of troops whose weapons, body armor, rucksacks and survival gear can weigh 130 pounds.

But an experiment to shave up to 20 pounds off a soldier’s burden — much of it by reducing the bulletproof plates that protect the chest and back — has stalled, leaving $3 million in new, lightweight equipment sitting in Virginia instead of being sent to the war zone where it was to have been tried out by a battalion-size group of 500 soldiers. The delay offers a new window into how Army rules have slowed the deployment of specialized gear that small units are seeking for harsh combat environments.

The new lightweight bulletproof plates, part of what is known as a Modular Body Armor Vest, are already in use by the military’s Special Operations Command, which includes the Army’s elite light-infantry troops, the Rangers.

A team of Army experts went to eastern Afghanistan in early March expecting to begin trial runs of the gear for regular Army soldiers, including a company assigned to the remote Korangal Valley, a harsh and primitive area of eastern Afghanistan where the insurgency has proved especially resilient, and where soldiers regularly set off on multiple-day patrols that require them to hike up and down steep valleys.

But the assessment team was ordered back to the United States late last month when its experiment was put on hold. The delays in the assessment were reported first by the Army Times.

According to Army officials familiar with the effort, senior Army leaders ordered further reviews of the lighter bulletproof plates to guarantee that soldiers would not be put at risk wearing them during the combat field tests; the leaders also wanted to expand the goals for the assessment. The officials who discussed the stalled study did so on ground rules of anonymity because of the senior-level review of the matter still under way.

The lighter set of plates and vest could reduce the load of conventional troops by about 20 pounds over the current Army-issue Improved Outer Tactical Vest.

The Special Operations Command prides itself on rapidly equipping its units with the latest in weaponry, body armor and war-fighting technology, and many of its innovations subsequently have been adopted by conventional forces. But some of its highly specialized gear carries with it a greater risk for the user, one that Special Operations commanders say is mitigated by the elite level of training given their forces.

All involved in the debate agree that the lighter plates and vest do not cover as much of the torso as the current Army body armor. But advocates of the lighter protection say that giving a soldier greater mobility contributes to survivability, and that the greatest threat to troops in eastern Afghanistan is from bullets, while the heavier vests were designed also to guard against shrapnel from roadside bombs.

Army officials say that the assessment, headed by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab in conjunction with the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group, will resume in about a month, and that the focus will be on the impact of the total soldier’s load and not on analyzing particular pieces of equipment, like the body armor alone.

“To preserve the validity of this assessment and evaluation on soldier performance, the Army decided to equip the unit with all types of lighter equipment simultaneously rather than in a piecemeal fashion,” an Army spokesman said.

The assessment is expected to resume “in the next month, pending a final decision from senior Army leadership,” the spokesman said.

Advocates of a more cautious assessment schedule cite the importance of getting the study right, saying it will guide decisions on equipping the entire force both to meet the challenges of combat in Afghanistan — where thousands of additional troops are being sent this year — and to lessen the physical strain that can lead to long-term injury.

But other officials counter that time has been wasted, and that the lighter gear is only one option to commanders whose troops are going out on patrol, because heavier body armor would remain at each base for use when more coverage of the upper body was needed.

Critics say the delays in testing the lighter body armor are another sign of Army inflexibility, even after years of efforts by the service to speed up its procurement process. The Army was also late to recognize the dangers posed by a reliance on soft-skinned Humvees for troops in Iraq, and then was slow in buying and building better-armored troop transports.

The Army has been driven to examine how to lighten the soldier’s load after years of adding heavier armor, night-vision goggles, rifle scopes, knives, water and food. A soldier on patrol carries, on average, 60 pounds of equipment, but in places like Afghanistan, where the terrain requires prolonged missions away from an operating base, the load can be doubled by the need for shelter, extra food, ammunition and other gear.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/wo...er=rss&emc=rss

[Utah Bob]

If conventional unit commanders eased up on body armor they might take more casualties. They might also be more combat effective but today apparently combat effectiveness is trumped by casualties.