Word: tanks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ITEM: The Army decided to build a light antitank bazooka at a cost of about $75 each. But once all the designers and program directors had finished tinkering, the weapon ended up costing $787. Even so, it would be hard pressed to knock out a modern Soviet tank. Reason: its shell cannot pierce the tank's forward armor. Congress tried to kill the project, but there is still money for it buried in the Pentagon budget...
...fixed fronts. Even the new Rapid Deployment Force has become bogged down with such weapons as the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. John Boyd, a leading tactician in the reformers' camp, argues that battles are usually won by maneuver, speed and surprise. Instead of heavy armor like the M-1 tank, which requires fleets of fuel trucks and frequent maintenance, the Army should rely on light infantry units...
...gathered support from all sides of the political spectrum. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank, published last month an unsparing critique of Pentagon management, arguing that complex technology is not only busting the budget but detracting from the military's ability to fight. "Tactics have been driven by technology," wrote former Army Captain George Kuhn in the report. "The evidence suggests that complex technology is usually relatively ineffective." The Council on Economic Priorities, a liberal research group in New York, also released a study of weapons procurement last month that zeroed in on the Pentagon...
...decrease in tank production and 95% drop in fighter-plane construction over 30 years is only the most obvious manifestation of the huge sacrifices of quantity being made to achieve technological sophistication. The Navy's decision to retire 22 ships this year starkly illustrates the dilemma. It placed the ships in mothballs in order to comply with a congressional order that it trim the sails of its 1983 spending. But the Navy did not want to cut planned procurement of new ships. Of the 13 Forrest Sherman-class escort destroyers that were retired, twelve had been extensively overhauled within...
Defenders of the system obviously claim that the quantitative decline in weapons has been offset by the qualitative advances in performance. No doubt the new M-1 tank, at least on paper, is faster and more powerful than the M-60 tank now in use. But the same amount of money could buy three times as many of the reliable M-60s as the problem-plagued M1s, a ratio that might strike battle commanders as quite attractive. Sprey, the former Pentagon official, argues that this type of numerical gain could come by buying cheaper rather than superexpensive weapons...