To make matters worse, the ISV is still deeply uncomfortable to ride in, making entering and exiting the vehicle rapidly in full combat gear a major challenge and further degrading the vehicle’s effectiveness in a combat situation. Add to it that service members’ inability to easily fire their weapons or dismount to engage targets made them sitting ducks during ambushes.
“The ability of the soldier to egress from [the] center and rear-seated positions in the ISV was hindered by the limited space and interference from stored mission equipment during missions,” the report says. “The seating positions for the soldiers are cramped and uncomfortable. During IOT&E, over 60 percent of the soldiers expressed dissatisfaction with the ISV ride comfort.”
This is the second devastatingly critical assessment of the ISV handed down by the Pentagon’s weapons tester in a row. The January 2020 OT&E report
noted that, with a lack of an underbody and ballistic survivability requirement, the ISV “will be susceptible to enemy threats and actions” — and the soldiers inside will remain basically helpless to respond.
“Soldiers cannot reach, stow, and secure equipment as needed, degrading and slowing mission operations,”
according to last year’s OT&E report, which noted during testing, soldiers on all ISVs “could not readily access items in their rucksacks without stopping the movement, dismounting, and removing their rucksacks from the vehicle.”
Despite these issues, the Army appears to be plowing ahead with its procurement and fielding of the ISV. The service
awarded GM Defense a $214.3 million contract in June 2020 to manufacture 649 ISVs for soldiers and, eventually, support the potential production of up to 2,065 vehicles over eight years with additional authorization.
“This vehicle is going to help Soldiers in the Infantry Brigade Combat Teams that currently walk everywhere,” Steve Herrick, product lead for Ground Mobility Vehicles with the Army,
said in a release following testing at the Yuma Proving Ground. “It’s made to be ‘a better boot,’ a capability that allows you to effectively change how you operate.”
In November 2021, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks even shared a brief video clip of her driving the ISV on Twitter:
But the fact that the Pentagon’s weapons tester says that the ISV is not fit for combat against a “near-peer threat” — the DoD euphemism for Russia and China — should give officials pause before actually deploying the ISV in any sort of contested environment, say, ever.
taskandpurpose.com
This guy wrote the Norwegian Blue sketch for Monty Python?
