Fiddle's Green

[perardua]

It always amuses me that the British SAS pretty much returned to their roots during the Gulf War - a clusterfuck in the form of B20, followed by going to much more successful Land Rover columns behind enemy lines - just like in Africa during WW2!

On the subject of light armour, there is some worry that if the Future Rapid Effect System is adopted by the British Army, we will lose the capabilities our CVR(T) family gave us. FRES is planned to be our future medium weight forces, comprising both tracked 'specialist vehicles' (recce, engineering, medical, etc) and wheeled 'utility vehicles' (APCs, etc), originally with a requirement to be C-130 portable, but that has since been dropped as unworkable. Of course, given the current state of the defence budget, this programme may not ever see the light of day, or at least, will be cut back significantly.

Regardless, while medium weight forces have their place, they will result in the loss of our light armour, which does offer quite a few useful capabilities. For a start, unmodified CVR(T) vehicles are light enough that not only are they easily carried in a C-130, but they can be underslung on a Chinook. There have also been reported incidents of the extremely low ground pressure of these vehicles making them unable to set off anti-tank mines, as well as enabling them to traverse extremely soft terrain (the Scorpions and Scimitars deployed to the Falklands proved this, and one of the regrets of the task force was that they did not take more). While the 30mm cannon on a Scorpion is not well-suited for fighting heavy armour, it is a good system for supporting light infantry, especially mounted on a platform that can get a lot of places. The downside in the current operational context, of course, is the vulnerability to IEDs.