ACE question for John A

I've seen a photo of an ACE prototype being used as a personnel carrier, with
troops trotting out of the bucket. Is such a thing ever done in reality, or is
it just someone's bright idea during trials? I would have thought the riflemen
would be unenthusiastic, and the engineers would see it as a misuse of their
machine.

> At 4:00 PM +0100 8/29/02, Robin Paul wrote:

I can sort of see it better than having the infantry roll up on foot.

> --- Robin Paul <Robin.Paul@tesco.net> wrote:

Gather 'Round, Boys and Girl, Uncle Gingerbeer (and his alternate
personalities) is going to tell the Story of the ACE.

Once upon a time (during the 1950s) there was this woman (can we call her a
dippy broad?) [No, dammit, we can't call her a dippy broad. It's a bedtime
story] (for wargamers!) [NO]. She was approached by
{knuckle-dragging self-propelled sandbags) [Shut Up]
the Marines. The Marines wanted her to design a
wonder-vehicle.  The wonder-vehicle would be the
perfect weapon for amphibious assault (But no one does opposed amphibious
assaults anymore!) [Yes, but if anyone says that out loud, Congress might
notice that the Marines are just really expensive riflemen without the heavy
weapons to make respectable light infantry and with no more special
capabilities than the 101st Air Assault]. The plan devised by the Marines was
that this wondervehicle would transport Marines from ships to the beach,
disembark them, and then dig fighting positions for them. (With an
earthmover??)
[Apparently the Marines have low standards for
fighting positions.] (Can an ACE make a better position for infantrymen than
is created when a 122mm shell bursts in sand?) [No. But shut up or it's back
in the closet for you.] The result was (or would become) the M9 ACE, with
aluminum body, roadwheels, roadarms, and everything else. It had rubber
waterproofing seals for the bowl, and a back door. Fast forward to 1985, and
the Army is looking for a fast earthmover. (Why?) [Damifino, I'd rather have a
dozer on a flatrack any day]. So they look over at the Marines and see the ACE
digging away, and driving real fast. The Brass didn't notice (have the brains
to notice) that what the Marines were digging in was beach sand and what the
ACE was racing were just HMMWVs. So the Army buys nearly 500 of them (7 per
company, 3 companys per BN, 20-something mech CE BNs).
So the Army gleefully starts digging holes in Texas
Clay, German rocks-covered-in-dirt, and other
non-sandy places.  To everyone's surprise (except the
operators, but who listens to EMs) everything broke. The aluminum belly plates
ripped out, exposing the hydraulic system to rocks. The road arms bent. The
overstressed hydraulics blew O-rings.  And because the
vehicle was designed by a (ivory tower academic dippy broad) [Last Warning]
female, the vehicle had over 2 MILES of hydraulic lines, some of which
required serious disassembly to get at to service. This perplexed the brass,
and they rubbed their lobotomy scars ferverently. So they began implements
piecemeal upgrade schemes. They added steel belly plates. They added steel
roadwheels. They let the waterproof seals drop off the property books and so
the troops promptly "lost them". They took off the back doors. They started
introducing steel road arms. They still havn't fixed the main problem, which
is that the ACE isn't a bulldozer and can't do a bulldozer's job. All it's
really good for is pushing spoil when you can get
dozer support.  You can work with all-ACE blade teams,
but that nearly doubles your stick time to get the job done. For every hour of
digging, they require fluid checks, lug nut tightening, and other maintinence.
And the hydraulic system still explodes at random.

But that's not the height of mismatched missions and equipment. The same brass
realized that since they retired the CEV without replacement (because the
morons in Congress refused to appropriate funds to maintain the Balkan mission
and Clinton refused to shut it down even though he couldn't afford it) the
combat engineer company had no non-bridge breach
assets remaining in it's assault and obstacle platoon. (What do they call it
that?) [Because it's supposed to lead assaults and create obstacles] (How can
it do that with no breach assets?) [You see the dilemma]. So the brass
scratched their lobotomy scars some more,
and decided that the M-9 ACE would be a wonderful
method for breaching berms and plowing lanes through minefields. (Apparently
they felt death rates among 12Bs weren't quite high enough) [That's it, The
Closet for you!] (No, no, no!) {THUMP, THUMP, BANG} [Sorry for the
interruption]. So this moderately fast, but
not nearly as fast as an M-1, vehicle with armor
intended to resist 7.62mm rounds, driven by a PFC with no TC, armed with a
manually operated 9mm weapon
system [Oddly enough, also called the M-9] is supposed
to be charging into the breach.

> At 8:54 AM -0700 8/29/02, John Atkinson wrote:

snip

No wonder you hate the thing so much. Al under-pan for an engineer
vehicle? It sounds like the only proper way to get a good set of combat
engineer vehicles is buy what the British have and stick it on a M1 Chassis or
buy their system off the shelf. It'd be better than nothing (for the logistics
headache) and would work.

The Brits have been building combat engineer kit since Percy Hobart started
building his Funnies. Of course at that time the US Army brass didn't want
tanks that only did things a bulldozer would do. The end result was dead
Americans on Utah and Omaha.

The US did call on the Brits and their Funnies to deal with the Cherbourg
fortifications. Typucally an AVRE and a crocodile was what worked. The AVRE
cracked the bunker and then the Churchill flamed it. According to some
accounts having the Churchill roll up and demonstrate its flame thrower range
and capacity was enough to get bunker defenders to start walking out with
their hands up.

From the Brit MV mags I've read they are keeping up the legacy. The new
generation of BARV is impressive. They still use fascines and still use the
AVRE in modern forms as well as AVLBs.