Ladies and Gentlemen,
The following article from Defense Week, states the BV-206 were Canadian, no problems with that. Yet at the same time, The Army Journal has stated that the vehicles were drawn from the 172nd Infantry Brigade in Alaska, and were operated in support of the 10th (Mountain) Division???
The tone of the article appears to be that the US Army never knew about this vehicle before the Canadian deployment?
Yours,
Jock in Sydney
Defense Week April 08, 2002
Canadians Put An Unusual Vehicle To The Test
By Nathan Hodge
The Canadian army‘s BV-206 is an ungainly looking beast: the six-ton, four- tracked vehicle looks like an overgrown snowmobile.
But according to its proponents, the "personnel/cargo carrier" performed well in Afghanistan, and it could offer lessons in deploying a relatively lightweight vehicle in remote terrain—lessons some experts say the U.S. Army would do well to heed as it looks to become more agile and mobile.
Built by Sweden‘s Hagglunds Vehicle, the BV-206 is not made to face an opposing armor force. The vehicle can be configured to carry four to 10 people, and is capable of mounting a machine gun or a TOW anti-tank weapon. According to the Canadian army‘s web site, the lightly armored BV-206 is designed more for territorial defense, domestic emergencies and peacekeeping. In Afghanistan, it served as a vehicle for ferrying Canadian troops and equipment in demanding high-altitude terrain. Canadian Navy Lt. Luc Charron, a Canadian military spokesman in Afghanistan, confirmed that several BV-206s were used last month during Operation Anaconda, the U.S.-led coalition‘s effort to flush out al Qaeda fighters from their mountain redoubts in southeastern Afghanistan.
In a press briefing last month, Vice Adm. Greg Maddison, Canada‘s deputy chief of staff, confirmed that the vehicles were moved near the Shah-I-Kot Valley to evacuate people or bring supplies, but were kept in reserve. But given the limitations imposed by the terrain, the BV-206 was a useful backup, Canadian officials said.
Canadian army Lt. Col. Pat Stogran, who led a detachment of 500 Canadian light infantry during the operation, suggested that aviation assets had been stretched thin during Anaconda; he and his soldiers were among the last of the coalition troops to be airlifted out of the Shah-i-Kot region, because there had not been enough choppers on hand to complete the exfiltration on March 17.
Christopher Hellman, senior research analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based think-tank, said the U.S. Army needs to pay more attention to unconventional vehicles like the BV-206, particularly as it looks to field a more lightweight, airliftable force.
"I bet you the [U.S.] 10th Mountain [Division] would love to get their hands on something like that," he said.
John Pike, the director of Globalsecurity.org, an independent defense research group, agreed. "If there would be any unit that ... might be able to trick some colonel into trying buying some of these," it would be the 172nd Infantry Brigade, a separate brigade of the 10th Mountain based in Alaska, Pike said. "They might be able to generate an Alaska-specific requirement for it that would not involve trying to persuade the other 30-some odd brigades in the Army that they were also going to have to get some of them."
Hellman compared the Canadians‘ use of the BV-206 to the Army‘s discovery of the usefulness of light all-terrain vehicles during the Gulf War. Those ATVs have become a ubiquitous feature of the current Afghan campaign, favored by special forces operating in the rough Afghan terrain.
"One of the things that we learned in the Persian Gulf is that having a dune buggy is really, really useful," said Hellman. "The special-ops guys, they were all over it like ugly on an ape."
The BV-206 is not built for force-on-force combat, but Pike suggested vehicles like it may be well suited to the kind of unconventional warfare seen in Afghanistan.
"It sounds better suited to special operations," he said. "They do not have the common-platform bias that the regular Army does, and they‘re quite accustomed to buying small numbers of unique equipment."
New toys
Pike said the Army has not identified requirements for a smaller tracked support vehicle like the BV-206.
Eric Emerton, a spokesman for the Army‘s Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, confirmed that the BV-206 was not considered in any light-vehicle competition. The BV-206 was never submitted as a competitor in any U.S. programs, he said.
But Pike said the experience of operating in a coalition force in Afghanistan may prompt the Army to do some more thinking about its vehicle needs. "It is unavoidably the case that, anytime you operate in a combined environment like that [Afghanistan], and other people show up with a toy that you don‘t have, it does ... raise questions about, well, maybe the U.S. needs that," he said.
However, the Army is trying to reduce the number of platforms that it has on the battlefield in order to reduce maintenance requirements and operating costs. In addition, it wants survivable vehicles.
"Our military is still thinking Cold War," said Hellman. "And because of that, they‘re not thinking about [deploying] in smaller groups into remote areas and things like that. We really have not dragged ourselves away from fighting World War III in Europe."
Hellman added that the Army could use more vehicles capable of being lifted by helicopters, as opposed to transport aircraft.
Such lessons in deployability seem especially pressing, particularly as the Army works over the requirements for a wheeled armored personnel carrier, called the Interim Armored Vehicle, or Stryker. The Stryker is designed to complement the Army‘s Interim Brigade Combat Team, a lighter force capable of deployment to anywhere on the globe in a combat-ready configuration.
The Stryker, the first four of which were delivered to the Army in February, has confronted weight issues.
Hellman said the Army needs to "wean itself" from some ideas about the weight and armor requirements for its future vehicle systems.
"We have to start looking at the idea that the weapons systems that we have—currently deployed or in the pipeline—don‘t dovetail terribly well with the mission requirements that we‘re looking at in the future," he said.
He compared it to the Navy‘s resistance to reintroducing "inferior" diesel- electric submarines: "In some ways you‘re cutting off your nose to spite your face, because you may actually have a situation where you could use a diesel boat."
Before looking at new vehicles, concluded Pike, the Army prefers to "figure out how it would fit into the Army organizational chart."
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Copyright 2002 King Communications Group
BV. Got too hate those errant camera shots by good ole CNN 
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