Red Falcons Further Integrate LTAVTThis week we caught up with Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, Red Falcons out deep in the Fort Bragg woods integrating the LTATV’s into the ranks.

Posted by 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division on Saturday, January 24, 2015

PENTAGON: As the Army explores buying an Ultra-Light Combat Vehicle, the 82nd Airborne Division is trying some out. That includes parachuting Polaris M-RZR vehicles out of airplanes, using them in wargames at Fort Bragg, and even lending some to visiting British paratroopers.

“We were quite jealous,” said one Brit, Maj. Ivan Rowlatt of the 16th Air Assault Brigade, which has a long and close relationship with the American Airborne — but no comparable vehicles of its own. Rowlatt’s company got a platoon of the light offroad vehicles for an air assault mission during the Fort Bragg wargames.

“Arguably, the target was too big for a company to handle,” Rowlatt said during a roundtable at the Pentagon yesterday. Foot troops alone would have been hard-pressed to cover all the enemy’s potential escape routes through the difficult terrain. But the vehicles gave them the mobility to cut off the bad guys, he said, as well as to rapidly evacuate simulated casualties during the battle.

The ultralight vehicles also proved useful to carry supplies and heavy weapons for the foot troops, as well as for reconnaissance, said Col. Joseph Ryan, commander of the 82nd Airborne’s 2nd Brigade. (The Army checked out some candidate Light Reconnaissance Vehicles this week). But the Airborne also had to fight the temptation to misuse the unarmored vehicles in potentially lethal ways.

“I can’t emphasize enough that these are not combat vehicles per se, they are mobility platforms that get us to a certain point,” said Ryan. “This is not a gun platform. I’ve resisted the temptation to put turrets [and] machineguns on them…. because if we try to fight from them, we’ll find out very quickly we will lose from them.”

The value of the vehicles is in getting foot troops to the battle quickly, not in carrying them during the battle. For the Airborne especially, Ryan said, they allow the paratroopers to drop in an undefended area and then drive cross-country to their target, instead of having to drop within walking distance. That, in turn, means Air Force transports and Army helicopters don’t have to fly into the teeth of enemy air defenses.

As exposed as passengers might feel in the unarmored light vehicles, that’s actually not the moment they’re most vulnerable. The most dangerous moment for paratroopers is when they’re in the air, said Ryan. A single surface-to-air missile could destroy a C-17 transport with 102 soldiers still inside.

By contrast, the MRZR carries at most four men. The Ultra-Light Combat Vehicles the Army is looking at buying carry nine. The larger vehicle puts more men at risk in a single, vulnerable package, but it also requires half as many vehicles to carry the same number of troops and keeps the standard 9-man squad together as a cohesive combat unit. The Airborne is using the smaller vehicles as surrogates to work out tactics, techniques, and procedures, but they’ll get the larger Special Operations Ground Mobility Vehicle soon. (A modified SOCOM GMV is one of the ULCV contenders). They’ll try out four GMVs in an August exercise at the National Training Center at Ft. Irwin, California.

There are plenty of wrinkles left to work out, Ryan said. To test the tactic of an “offset” drop — i.e. dropping well away from the target and then driving there in ULCVs — a company of MRZR-mounted troops at a distance from the rest of the brigade. That put them out of range of the Airborne’s regular communications gear, which is designed to connect troops moving short distances on foot. The brigade improvised various solutions but they’re still “experimenting,” Ryan said. He’s prioritized getting a communications package on the vehicles over getting sexier stuff like guns, he said, because good communications are crucial to coordinated tactics.

One thing that’s been easier than expected, surprisingly, is maintenance. The Airborne has its own mechanics — each brigade has a small number of air-droppable vehicles already, including bulldozers for the combat engineers — and it proved straightforward to train them on the MRZR.

“Certainly there is a cost to the parts,” Ryan said, ” [but] not anywhere near what our projections might have been.”

The trickiest bit was getting everyone to remember that the MRZR takes regular gas, not the diesel fuel standard on most Army vehicles. “We’ve got to come up with innovative ways to make sure we don’t make silly mistakes,” said Ryan.

That said, “we’ve seen the maintenance side of this as a relatively huge success,” the colonel continued. “We haven’t broken them all that often and we’ve trained with them pretty hard.”