This video, covering a scaled down prototype of the Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC) craft, caught my attention:
The UHAC drives across the water on treads that double as paddlewheel-style water propulsion.
That video dropped this week, but most of the UHAC testing seemed to have happened back in 2014. (Another sign that the video is old is the mention of the USS Bonhomme Richard as though it were still in service, when it infamously burned up in 2020. In fact, the arson trial of Ryan Sawyer Mays, the disgruntled SEAL washout accused of setting the fire, is going on this week.)
If the program is dead, I can understand why. The UHAC seen in the video is only one-fifth of the projected size of the final vehicle, which was supposed to be 84 ft long and 34 ft high. That’s roughly 75% as big as Nazi Germany’s contemplated but never-even-attempted Landkreuzer P. 1000 Ratte tank, a project remembered for being long on imagination and short on practicality. Things that large tend to be a big magnet for air and artillery targeting.
Another thing probably dooming it: the Marine Corp decision to move away from tanks. An amphibious assault vehicle that (as per the video) can carry three M1A1 Abrams tanks probably won’t be a priority if you don’t have any in inventory.
Tags: arson, Crime, Marines, Military, Ryan Sawyer Mays, tanks, Ultra Heavy-Lift Amphibious Connector (UHAC), USS Bonhomme Richard, video
I love the Marines. I really do. But… Jesus. Some of the decisions that are coming out of the Corps, these days?
The first one that had me going “WTF? Really?” was the whole “Let’s sh*tcan the M249 and belt-fed weapons down in the squads, we’ll replace them with the HK 416…” course of thought and action. The Marine theory was that the belt-fed SAW was too unwieldly and slowing down their infantry.
This goes against just about everything we’ve learned about infantry combat since WWII. My take is that if you’re moving too fast for your belt-feds to keep up…? You’re probably moving too damn fast. The Marine idea is that combat is best conducted by little clots of riflemen moving fast and loose across the landscape. I think that’s going to go down hard in the face of anyone who knows what they are doing, and who is actually even semi-competent.
The key infantry lesson of WWII that the US military didn’t pick up on is this: It’s not about the manpower, it is the firepower. You can have your soldiers do all the nifty maneuvering you like, but at the end of the day? If they’ve not got the firepower to dominate the fight, those maneuvers are pointless. The key is, get the firepower you need into position to dominate terrain. Don’t have that firepower? Someone who does will simply scrape you up off of whatever it is you’re occupying.
The essence of the Marine error here is that they think they can fight war the way the idiots that designed the 9th Infantry did, and “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee…” That sh*t don’t fly, against a competent peer-level enemy. I don’t care how good your intel might be, or how much “networked fires” you have access to, the raw fact is that you’d better be able to slug it out when you have to. If you can’t, you die.
Learned that the hard way, going up against 4th ID tankers with my buddies in the 9th. Sure, we inflicted some losses, but the reality was that once they got us in their sights, we were toasty-fried on a spit, ‘cos unarmored TOW HMMWVs evaporate like spit on a hot griddle, under observed artillery fires.
Light and fast has a place, but that place ain’t taking on main force units of a competent enemy.
I suspect that the Marines are going to learn this the hard way, and that the decision to do away with tanks and other heavy armor is going to bite them in the ass just as hard as that decision to do away with the belt-fed in the squads. Yeah, war has changed, but not nearly so much that these facts have gone away…
To quote the old Bill Mauldin cartoon, “A movin’ foxhole attracks the eye…” And Large Marge there sends out the message of “high value target”, especially if can be plonked out in deeper water – it’s not like the cargo is going to drive the rest of the way along the bottom, after all.
And even without getting shot at, there’s the usual issues. “Shit. Hey LT, that big bitch threw a track again!”
The root problem is that over-the-shore is a bad way to make a really large-scale attack on someone with modern arms and who is paying attention to what you are doing.
Time was, you could pull off a D-Day style invasion. Those days passed about the time they invented sea-skimming missiles and radar. It’s about time we paid attention to that fact.
Airborne also suffers from this problem. I can’t wait to see what happens to a large Airborne element making a parachute drop into defended terrain where they have a bunch of drones ready and waiting to go up and start wreaking havoc in their shroud lines and canopies… T’won’t be at all pretty. They won’t need weapons, just some UAV assets with pre-programmed algorithms to go after the parachutes.
Taiwan, are you listenin’…?
Kirk says airborne attacks won’t work nor will seaborne attacks. Which leaves?
In the 70s they told us main battle tanks were dinosaurs. They tell us carriers are dodos, yet every is building them. These same geniuses killed big gun warships yet nothing can surpass them in accuracy, weight of tonnage delivered, in spite of weather.
And if missiles have made naval inbvasions outdated don’t tell it to the Chinese. In fact if anyone believed it why maintain a USMC?
I have seen these wizards develop new platforms which do nothng but fatten the wallets of defense contractors, which I suspect is the reason such shis werebuilt. New technologies were touted without adequate testing and development leading to the expected failures. No doubt their sponsors are all in major command posts.
Its always McNamara’s wiz kids doing their thing and others paying the price in blood.
And our government is more interested in drag queen shows and purging the military of toxic masculinity than building an effective war fighting machine. What next purging Rbert E. Lee from West Point?