Parasitic land vehicles for the army

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I spent a lot of time reading and musing about the problem potential promise challenge of having agile army formations, especially brigades. A single reinforced battalion battlegroup can easily have more than a hundred vehicles and this gets cumbersome real quick.

The road march length (vehicle lengths + depending on army and circumstances 50-150 m spacing between vehicles) can reach into kilometres real quick. Where to position your combat troops, where the support? Combat up front is nice for a frontal contact, with rearguard offers at least some mobile reserve, dispersed means best convoy defence everywhere against moderate threats, but is hopeless if there's a peer force contact anywhere. The greater the convoy, the worse the propblem.

Luckily, road march length is actually outdated thinking. Nowadays it's more about the time a convoy needs to pass a point, which adds the element of average minimum vehicle speed. Still, a road march length of 10 minutes means a rearguard would at least take five minutes to help the centre in an ambush. Five minutes is a helluva lot time if armoured recce cars with autocannons engage machinegun-armed trucks. Also keep in mind there are often times not multiple, but only one (wo)man in some vehicles during logistical marches. I personally wouldn't want more than one per fuel or ammo truck anyway.

The vulnerability and clumsiness of large convoys is one thing; setting up and breaking camp is almost a science. Imagine the battalion CO wants the battalion battlegroup of more than a hundred vehicles - scattered in groups of small units in a wood or town - to break camp and resume march in any of four or five possible directions on short notice. Say, hostile forces may arrive and be noticed only minutes prior to arrival because security details cannot be set up far away for want of enough troops and the hostiles may be moving at 60 kph once they sense the presence of forces to be caught in inferior readiness for battle. 5 km radius for pickets, 60 kph - five minutes to either break camp and evade or to stand and fight. Horrible*.

Even a less horrible scenario may demand a very quick resumption of movement in an unplanned direction. Frequent movements and stops don't allow a textbook plan for the order of small units resuming the march for any possible direction. It depends on improvisation and training, on junior leadership and drivers getting it almost right without elaborate planning, rather based on standing operating procedures and experience.

Again, having less vehicles makes it all much less troublesome.

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It's thus that some issues concerning the agility of a battlegroup or brigade boil down at least in part to the quantity of vehicles.

This is why I'm so utterly amazed at the -in my opinion- crazy amount of wide low capacity vehicles ("wide" meant to exclude motorcycles without sidecars and small ATVs). The hordes of HMMWV- and Wolf-style vehicles always made me wonder: Why?

Want to operate a small radar? Two HMMWVs plus one or two trailers. Military chaplain? Gets a HMMWV and a driver. Officer on a mission from HQ to a subordinate unit? HMMWV and driver. Company HQ? Multiple HMMWVs and a real truck.

This way of providing mobility is extremely wasteful and outright incompatible with striving for great agility on the battlefield.

To find a way that solves a problem of such scale isn't easy, but I suppose I can submit at least a partial cure: Parasitic vehicles.

Look at this:

Forklift carried by truck

Some container trucks have their own forklifts. These parasitic vehicles are meant to reduce the wait time of the driver at depots and destinations; he can unload or load his truck without needing to wait for such a service. (S)he can work and add to income during times when the truck's log thinks he's having one of the breaks which are legally enforced for road safety in at least some countries.

Now back to the chaplain: I wouldn't give him a HMMWV and certainly no driver (who would be used as replacement for less useless job vacancies in a conflict anyway). Instead, I would give him (and many others, such as the company senior NCO ("Spieß") or couriers a durable diesel-powered ATV and establish as standard that almost all medium and heavy trucks need to be able to add such a parasitic vehicle (or equivalent extra payload container) to their back.

I would insist on more ground clearance than seen on the photo, of course.

I suppose this way we could eliminate up to 5% of all wide vehicles in a brigade, somewhat less in non-reinforced combat battalions.

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Another way is the widely publicised way of replacing electricity generator trailers by using some kind of hybrid (combustion engine + electric motors) propulsion in light and medium trucks. The trailers wouldn't disappear, of course - it's human nature to use this freed cargo space instead for some other payload than a generator. We might save a few dedicated cargo trucks this way, though.

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Back to a not widely publicised method; multiple use trucks. Most trucks are assigned to only one use, and this use requires the capacity of a 1.5, 3, 6 or whatever ton vehicle. Thus the army uses a 1.5, 3, 6 or whatever ton vehicle.

Now imagine we would not use a 3 ton truck, but a nine ton truck. The typical reaction would be an accusation of wasteful behaviour ("über den Durst"). Well, my reasoning is that three one-and-a-half task trucks can easily replace four specialised trucks.

Just imagine bigger fuel tanks, some extra storage for tent tarpaulin, some extra storage for ammo or medical supplies, food, spare tires, spare powerpacks, water filtration set, road repair equipment etc.

Some of the rather specialised extra cargo (such as spare powerpacks) would create a coordination challenge (how would the field vehicle repair workshop know whom to call for a spare powerpack?), while other extra supplies could be distributed in a most decentralised way (unless this actually kills some bureaucrat): Another small unit arrives, has a break, asks for some supplies such as diesel fuel. 

It's human nature that some would respond by hoarding and reject the request, but it's also human nature that the framework would encourage unbureaucratic black market trading.

Voilà, some supply problems solved.

I suppose we could at the very least reduce the wide vehicle count in Western armies by about 10-15% without actually losing anything important - and thus lower one roadblock on the way to a much-improved battlefield agility of our manoeuvre formations.

S Ortmann

*: Keeping companies largely separated doesn't help much, unless your tactics don't depend on more than company-sized manoeuvre elements for more than very short durations. It may depend on it for short durations only, but those are likely the time windows during which the performance is most important.

edit because of comments:


FORGET about reducing the spacing (gap) between vehicles as a solution. That's not even practical for civilian purposes and outright foolish for military marches in a theatre of war.
I looked around a bit for something I could refer to and think page 10 of this (chapter on dispersion) might serve as an intro into the cast-in-stone fact that military convoys shall not bunch up with tiny spacing between vehicles.
I mentioned the "50-150 m spacing" for a reason!

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