A Cross-Fire of Visions for a New U.S. Military

To a soldier on the front lines, few sights are more welcome than a big American gun nearby, pounding the enemy.

That is a major reason why the fight over whether to cancel the Crusader artillery system, which will spill into the Senate this week, is proving to be so sensitive inside the Pentagon and Congress.

Many Army generals believe the Crusader would help ensure that GIs have all the support firepower they need if called into a major ground war. In the Crusader, they see a mobile cannon designed to pulverize large numbers of enemy soldiers before they can attack.

But those generals have been overruled by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Seeking a lighter, more lethal force, Rumsfeld contends that the 40-ton piece of weaponry is so heavy that the Pentagon would have trouble getting it to tomorrow’s battlefields in time.

On the surface, the debate is about the politics of $11 billion in defense spending. Leading congressional supporters of the system, Oklahoma Republicans, are scrambling to save the Crusader, and with it a lucrative home-state weapon contract.

But underneath are competing strategic visions for the armed services and whether the military should, literally, lose some weight.

Inside the Army, despite the rising importance of air power in modern warfare, many generals still place great faith in ground artillery. It is a faith based on the service’s history, tradition and culture.

“If you’re an infantryman, and you’re standing on a hilltop and you call in close air support, you can be waiting for up to an hour to get that,” a senior Army general said. “And when you’re in combat, minutes turn to hours. It becomes a little like ordering a pizza from a subcontractor on a Saturday night.

“With artillery, you tell your guy you need it, and it’s there.”

The system began development in 1994 after the Persian Gulf War. Even though the U.S. forces easily won that war, U.S. generals fretted at the time that their Vietnam-era artillery didn’t match up with Iraqi guns.

The Crusader, a 155-millimeter, self-propelled howitzer, can lob 10 to 12 rounds per minute, or three times as many as the system it would replace, known as the Paladin. The Crusader can hit targets 30 miles away, compared to Paladin’s range of about 19 miles. Computerized robotic systems handle ammunition and firing. The weapon is being built by United Defense LP, a unit of the Carlyle Group, and is scheduled for deployment by 2008.

“Its relentless firepower and range weakens our enemies--before they get close enough to harm us,” says www.teamcrusader.com, a Web site run by groups lobbying for the system.

But the weight of the mobile cannon, 40 tons, and that of its resupply vehicle, 34 tons, pose a significant disadvantage.

It requires ships or exceptionally large cargo planes--and a lot of planning--to move around the world. And once the Crusader arrives at a conflict zone, some worry, it might be too heavy for local roads or bridges to handle.

Recent military conflicts have exposed another potential weakness: firing precision. What mattered in remote Afghan mountains was hitting small pockets of Al Qaeda fighters who were making themselves elusive targets. That’s not Crusader’s specialty. It is designed to spray fire at enemies over a wide terrain.

What makes the Crusader “out of date” is its imprecision, says Daniel Goure, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute, a conservative think tank in Arlington, Va. “It’s what you use when you’re facing hordes of Russians, not what you use when you’re facing specific targets.”

The Army has been considering the pros and cons of the Crusader in recent years as it reviewed global strategy after the Cold War. Especially since the 1999 conflict in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, when the Army faced embarrassing delays in deployment of key weapons, it has come under pressure to become a lighter, faster expeditionary force.

Responding to that call, the Army shed many tons from the original design of the Crusader and cut back on the number of units to be manufactured. But it has resisted, until now, efforts to kill the program outright. Last week the Army reluctantly fell into line behind Rumsfeld’s order to do so.

The decision remains subject to congressional review. The House early Friday approved a defense bill with a provision urging the Pentagon not to kill the system. The Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday will quiz Rumsfeld and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki on the matter.

The reason the Army resisted for so long is that defense strategists still have not reached consensus on what coming wars will look like. Will they be in the deserts of the Middle East? In Africa? On the Korean peninsula? Does the Pentagon still need to plan for battle in Europe?

“If you’re looking to an uncertain future, where you really can’t predict the one or two enemies that you’re going to fight, you say, ‘What kind of a force are we going to need?’” said a top Army strategist. “And the answer kept coming back to, ‘You’ve got to have a little light, you’ve got to have a little heavy.’”

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told reporters Friday that he was withholding judgment on the Crusader until he hears directly from Rumsfeld. Until recently, Levin said, Rumsfeld and the Army had argued strongly for the weapon.

“We want to hear both cases,” Levin said at a news conference. “There’s obviously a U-turn here that’s been taken by the secretary of Defense.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Crusader Comparison

(text of infobox not included)