OK, so I was on the by invitation only Stellar Parthenon BBS, and there was a discussion of the first flight of the Airbus A400M, the subject of its merits vs. the C-130 came up, and I noted that it has twice the size and carrying capacity of the C-130, so it can do things that the C-130 can’t like transporting medium combat vehicles in a relatively straightforward manner.

Someone asked if it might not just be easier to design a vehicle to the C-130, and I unleashed a stream of consciousness torrent on transporting an armored fighting vehicle on a C-130 born of my 3 years working on the (now canceled) Future Combat Systems manned ground vehicle program (FCS-MGV).

I got some attaboys, so I figured that it needed to be shared and I thought that it needed to be shared, with some minor cleanup and added footnotes ……… lots ……… and lots ……… and lots of footnotes:

I spent 3 years trying to get the now-canceled “20-ton class” (about 30T when I left)^* Future Combat Systems Recovery and Maintenance Vehicle (FRMV) into a f%$#ing C-130.

It rolled off the aircraft with the combat utility of a Hummvee with about 5 gallons of fuel in it.^†

On a brand new vehicle, specifically designed to fit on the C-130, you had to pull off all the armor, the antennas and communications boxes^‡, the guns^§, squat the suspension, and even then you had to use 3 sortees to transport 2 vehicles…Only the real number for vehicles was likely closer to 5 when you count consumables like fuel and a load of ammunition, AND you get a range (assuming no fuel on the far end) of about 200 miles.^¥

The Stryker barely fits in a C-130, and has to be reassembled on the other end (though to a slightly lesser degree), and it really cannot carry the advertised amount of troops, unless you are fielding the midget anorexic brigade.^Ø

For a medium (17T<x<35T empty weight without ammunition or fuel) vehicle, you can’t get it on a C-130 without taking the motherf%$#er apart.

The C-130 can do a lot of things, but it was never designed to transport anything much larger than a 2-1/2 ton military truck.

Jeebus….I had forgotten how much the bulls%$# specifications for that pissed me off, even 3 years later.

I worked with some really top notch people, and no one beneath the senior management types thought that it could be made to work. The joke was ……… OK, my joke was ……… that if you could convert cynicism into fuel, we could power the state of Pennsylvania.

The program was doomed from the start, even without the clusterf%$# that was the lead system integrator (LSI) model of development and procurement.

^*The recovery vehicle had to be at least as heavy as the heaviest variant, because otherwise it could not reliably winch that vehicle out of a ditch.

^†One of the central ideas between operating the FCS-MGV was that the FRMV would be the first in, because it had a crane, which you needed to put the f%$#ing vehicles back together again, so you would be the first into a potentially hot LZ, without gun, a little 25mm grenade launcher, or armor.

^‡Remember, the core idea of the Future Combat Systems is that the network is so capable that you can use information awareness to defeat the enemy with lighter vehicles, only you roll off the C-130 blind, deaf, and dumb.

^§In our case, the little pop up 25mm grenade launcher, for the howitzer version, and the anti-tank gun version, the guns stayed on.

^¥It might have been 300 miles, I’m working from memory, and the army used the numbers that Lockheed Martin gave out for the aircraft, but he USAF maintained that you could not operate the aircraft at those weights, so it was a clusterf%$# from the start anyway. That being said, even using the Army’s/Lockheed’s numbers, it was faster to drive a unit of action^ß that distance than it was to dissemble the vehicles, ship them there, and reassemble them after the requisite few hundred sorties were completed.

^ßYeah, as part of this, they felt it was necessary to rename the “brigade” and call it a “unit of action”, I guess because it sounded snazzy, and it would impress the budget weenies.

^ØIt should be noted that tracked vehicles are actually slightly more space efficient than an equivalent wheeled vehicle though, since you need more clearance around the wheels in order to accommodate their range of motion when steering, something that you don’t need with a tracked vehicle, which steers by differential speeds between the treads, the troop variant, the Infantry Carrier Vehicle (ICV), actually carried a crew of 2 and 9 troops, which compared favorably to the 3+6 carried by the Bradley IFV.^€

^€Of course, if you put a completely remote controlled turret on a Bradley, and there are at least a half dozen of them on the market, and eliminated the gunner, you could get a full 9 man squad, just the the ICV.