Bigger Must Be Better

In the interest of full disclosure, I have to state that I'm nowhere near where this vehicle may be deployed, so I don't know anything about it firsthand.

What I do know is this: that a 70-ton behemoth approach is what has us in the current tactical and strategic situation in the first place.

The Marines have deployed a variant of the M1 tank known as the Assault Breacher Vehicle. Sounds bad just saying it, doesn't it? Nothing about this vehicle is designed to win hearts and minds.

In fact, if you read the article, it describes how there's a scoop on the vehicle for the sole purpose of filling in irrigation canals as it goes so access can be granted to wheeled vehicles following behind.

Here's why this is a bad idea.

Iraq, 2007-2008. The post I was assigned to had a ton of eucalyptus trees on it. Eucalyptus are a fairly hardy plant, and if they start to fail, you're in a serious drought situation. All of them were starting to die. Why? Lack of rain, for one…for the other, there was an irrigation system that had been set up to keep them watered, but the military had filled in all those ditches in order to make the roads a little wider for vehicle traffic.

All the trees were dying.

Flash forward to Afghanistan. Irrigation canals to water crops. Large ABV comes through, fills them in during the course of the assault.

Who's going to go back and dig them out again? Here's the irony…we built those same canals in the 50's and 60's. Those were part of US assistance to the region during THAT time period.

So what we have is US military vehicles destroying US aid projects to get Taliban.

Then we leave, Taliban may or may not still be here. Irrigation is gone.

I'm sure we're going to make friends with this one.

Now, again…full disclosure: the intent of the ABV is to keep Marines out of harm's way as they breach what could be a fairly nasty set of IED's, as the local bad guys have had a lot of time to put them in place. It's no the breach that worries me, it's what happens after the shooting. Marines (heavy sigh, since I'm about to give them props) have embraced the "hearts and minds" concept in ways that their Army counterparts have not done as successfully, but if they get ordered to leave, do we have the capacity to restore what we've wrecked? It's the perennial curve vs. disease debate, but it's an essential question in stability and support operations.