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Showing posts with label armoured bulldozer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label armoured bulldozer. Show all posts

D-9+003[i-D-9+003]
Brigadier Tim Radford, the head of British forces in Afghanistan, has said more helicopters and surveillance aircraft would make his troops "more tactically effective". But then, so would bulldozers - and they are considerably less expensive.

Interestingly, I had an e-mail from a serving US officer who had experienced the use of D-9s in Iraq. He describes how his infantry had surrounded a house in which insurgents had holed up. Instead of storming the house or calling in airpower, they whistled up the D-9. Because its armour kit had been made in Israel, the troops called it the "the Zionist Monster". Oddly enough, the Israelis call it the "Doobie" – the teddy bear.

The great advantage of the D-9, he said, was that it is very slow and noisy. You can hear it coming for miles – call it "dramatic effect". On this occasion, long before it could be seen, the growling and clanking could be heard, growing in intensity, the tension rising all the time.

When it hove into view, it trundled up to the front door of the house, impervious to AK-47 fire and RPGs. Then stopping, the driver actuated the blade lift, raising the 18-ton steel blade to its full height. He let it drop, free-fall. When the ground had stopped shaking, the insurgents came out with their hands up.

In IED country, lightly armoured Humvees would often form up in convoy behind a D-9. It took them longer to get to their destinations – but at least they got there, unharmed. Now that's "tactically effective".

COMMENT THREAD

HMEE[i-HMEE]Re-reading Michael Yon's latest despatch for the umpteenth time, my own thinking hardens into a single question: why are we messing about?

The heaviest piece of kit used in the entire operation to clear Pharmacy Road is an armoured JCB (pictured left) – with all the substance and presence of a Tonka toy. It is not even an HMEE.

The dangerous work is done by unprotected troops and ordnance clearance teams driving nothing more lethal than the absurdly expensive, unarmoured Tellar Disposal and Search Explosives Ordnance Disposal vehicles.

What we should have been using were these (pictured below) – the Mantak D-9 Armoured Bulldozer. There is even a remote-control version.

link[i-link]
There are more pics here (about eight-tenths the way down). One of the captions reads:

Talk About Intimidating. You do NOT want to be anywhere around this monster when it is barrelling towards you with several tons of mines scooped up from your locally laid minefield, otherwise you might be eating a lot of dirt and body parts for dinner.
Procedure-wise, what should have been done is equally straightforward. A straight line should have been drawn on a map, between FOB Jackson and FB Wishtan. The route should have been published well in advance, with warnings to keep clear. On the appointed day, the D-9 is started up, put into gear and driven from A to B, in a straight line. This is the engineering solution.

Michael Yon writes about these baked mud walls stopping 30mm cannon rounds and being left standing when 500lb bombs drop in compounds. They would not last two minutes in front of a D-9.

Then, you open up a compensation office and pay a fair price for the damage. The cost would still be cheaper than a brace of GBUs and the delivery charges – much less the compensation you have to pay to the relatives of dead soldiers and limbless servicemen.

But what about "hearts and minds?" I hear you cry. Well, there is nothing benign in permitting the Taleban to kill Afghan citizens. Yon writes that two civilians were killed by IEDs after the road clearance operation.

One was killed when he tried to strip one of the blown-up vehicles left by the British engineers. The other died on a route he had thought cleared by the British. It had not been. "The Taleban blows up a lot of local people in Sangin," Yon observes. Where is the "hearts and minds" in allowing that to happen?

The Afghanis, we are told, want security more than anything. That is how you give it to them. Sending out our own young men to die in narrow alleys, surrounded by high walls, prey to the IED and the bullet, is not. It achieves nothing.

Blessed be the peacemaker – it is called an armoured D-9.

COMMENT THREAD

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