________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
Q:
Do you see, as the Bradleys get finished and the M1s get in place, that there'll be more
support for the procurement of these breachers?
A:
Well, there's a lot of support there now. Whether you go out to the NTC with a M113/M
60 force or a Bradley/M1 force, the facts are that when you run into an obstacle, you stop.
Certainly the speed of the Bradleys and the speed of the M1s on that battlefield are
wonderful, but if we're going to hit an obstacle every three or four kilometers--and we have
mission area analyses that say that we will hit it even more often than that in some arenas--
then we're just not going to realize the capability of those vehicles unless we solve that
countermine problem and the ability to get through an obstacle.
Q:
Our friends in the East are very good at mines, aren't they?
A:
They're very good. We talk competitive strategies now in great detail, you know. The
question would be, "What can we use as our strengths against their vulnerabilities?" We
would say that we know they have vulnerabilities. If they intend to succeed through
mechanized columns and mass and they want to push through our defense, then we are going
to succeed against that by employing good defenses at the forward line of our own troops and
in depth. In other words, we use our countermobility mines, obstacles, defenses to break up
their formations, slow them down, to attack their second echelons by fire to slow them down,
disrupt their formations, and then use maneuver, the highly mobile character of our weapons
systems, to maneuver to achieve our advantage.
The Soviets, practicing competitive strategies, also look to us and say, "They, because of
lesser forces in the face of our coming forward, are going to have to use maneuver. They
preach it; they have an AirLand Battle doctrine that says they're going to use maneuver, so
we are now going to organize for, equip for, and train for flank mining to protect our flanks
so we can thwart their maneuver so we can keep going in our mass thrust." I think we can see
that in how they've reacted to our AirLand Battle doctrine, which means we very badly need
to solve our countermine initiative, which brings me to another thing.
That is, we've been talking countermine as a spinoff of EForce, but in effect, the
countermine problem was a separate issue that we started working on way back. The Defense
Science Board in 1985 took on the task of looking at mine warfare and countermine as an
issue.
Looking at the counterobstacle vehicle, General [Richard H.] Thompson, then commanding
AMC, wrote General [William R.] Richardson, commanding TRADOC, and said, "I think
we need an initiative to fix countermine." As part of that we established a general officer
steering committee that I was given responsibility to chair to address, in General
Richardson's words, "Our countermine deficiencies across the entire spectrum of conflict in
all mission areas, all elements of performance"--that is, doctrine, organization, equipment,
training--and to work with AMC. We set up that steering committee and began to work.
As we talk at this moment, we are hoping to get back from the printer the countermine
initiative study. We had work groups and addressed the countermine problem and put
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