with it's turret located two thirds of the way back on the hull. It is hard to approach crests to look over, without exposing too much of the turret and vehicle in the process. On Corners, the driver sees everything before anyone in the Turret, Gunner or Comd, and has the tendency for the whole vehicle to become exposed for the Comd to be able to see and/or employ his weapons. (Should the Comd now sit in the Drivers hole?
Hm, that's an interesting point. As I mentioned, I've done Recce in Bison, and the crew commander's hole in Bison is way forward.
http://farnorthracing.com/armypics/43.jpg
So I didn't encounter those problems.
As far as mobility went, I felt that Bison was almost as capable as M113 (the only tracked vehicle I had recce experience in) and was WAY faster. There was one position I remember getting my carrier into that I probably couldn't have done in Bison without getting a good run at it... but I never felt mobility limited in Bison. Perhaps the extra weight of Coyote is the issue.
Perhaps a little noisy, but that was mostly exhaust note and could be fixed with a different muffler.
And I L-O-V-E-D the room inside a Bison. Give me a troop of Bison and I'd be a very happy camper.
As I said, the only large vehicle of this type that I would even consider for Recce is the Luchs.
Luchs is an interesting vehicle, and that German concept of the double-ended vehicle (that goes back to WW2) is clever and useful. I'd take that too.
On the other end of the spectrum... the PEIR had an operational Ferret, and I've crew commanded it on a couple of ceremonial and administrative occasions. I don't have a feel for its cross-country performance, but I've got a rough idea for what it would be like on-road. My take on it is that it was very, very cramped, with no room for all the gypsy caravan stuff we usually take with us on an extended op (including the observer!). I could see using it as a patrol vehicle out of a fixed home base, and I can see where the small size and low profile (plus the amazing sight lines) would be useful, but I think Ferret is too small.
So I guess that sets our upper and lower bounds on vehicle size, doesn't it?
To do that you need boots on the ground (in general terms I will admit rubber on pavement works for route stuff).
Well there's a lot more to it than that in the Armoured Recce case.
Mechanized formations can cover a lot of ground in a fairly short time. It is not unusual for a formation to pick up and move 500km-1000km in one day, especially if the move isn't resisted for most of its length. But as formations get larger, the amount of operational inertia they get gets larger as well. It takes time for orders to propegate and battle procedure to occur, such that there is a signifigant time lag in getting a large formation to start. stop, or change direction.
As a formation commander, if there are decision points in your plan, you need to know all the information you need in order to pick which branch of your decision tree you are going to follow BEFORE you enter into the time lag it takes to send that decision to all your subunits. So if it takes 6 hours from "make it so" to the lead callsigns of your force reacting to that order, then you need to get the information on the decision point *at least* 6 hours in advance, and preferably sooner so you can do some decent analysis of that information.
That means you need a sub-formation capable of scampering out to anywhere within your radius of operation, getting the information you need to make your decisions, and getting it back to you in time so that plans can be implemented based on that information.
The larger the formation, the longer the inertial time lag, and the more frontage you cover, so the more people you need to be able to cover the ground you need to know about.
That is Armoured recce's primary job - going forth well in advance of main formations and gathering the information the formation commander needs in order to carry out his plan.
Now as a side effect, the requirements of that job demand soldiers capable of moving, thinking, and reacting quickly - usually with little real-time guidence from higher formations - and with no support. That bred a generation of supremely flexible, adaptive, and creative soldiers capable of doing a lot more with limited resources than one would otherwise expect. That capability encouraged giving these units a lot of oddball other missions that were poor fits elsewhere but which recce soldiers could take in stride, such that recce's missions got very diverse. As well, clever commanders would make use of the fact that recce was operating so far ahead of his main body to influence the battle in the far distance, and recce was very good at improv. But the other side effect of all this was that nobody outside of recce and formation headquarters ever saw any of this happening, because recce was so far forward.
As we push combined arms operations (and perhaps more importantly, the independant command of combined arms operations) into smaller and smaller formations, we are pushing the need for integral Armoured Recce into smaller and smaller formations, and exposing commanders to recce and their mission earlier in their careers than would otherwise be the case. This seems to be causing some confusion, because nobody seems to be explaining to anybody exactly what recce brings to them before (I guess) Staff College.
The Armoured recce mission shares some techniques and tactics with Infantry recce, and sometimes we do things (that flexibility thing again) that Infantry recce would be completely capable of doing. But we'd do things on the way to that mission, and on the way back from that mission, which are completely outside of the Infantry recce idiom.
When you talk about "boots on the ground" I hear SLOW (and thus CLOSE, because distance and time are the same thing)
DG
