Living With Tanks

by Brigadier (Ret.) Richard E. Simpkin (Pd. note. The following is a speech given by Brigadier (Ret.) Richard E. Simpkin, British Army, to the Thunderbolt Chapter of the Armor Association at Fort Knox, Ky.) It’s been the best part of 20 years since I did much active tanking, so it may strike you as odd that I should come to the “Home of Armor” and talk to you about living with tanks. That’show it strikes me too. But I do seem to have scored a world first in both classified and published discussion by setting out to write a book about the human side of tanking-a kind of tanker’s charter, if you like (“Human Factors in Mechanized Warfare,” Ed.). The idea came from a remark Major General Patton made in a very generous review of my first military book. and it gained force from talking to the Swedish designer, Sven Berge, as he was driving me from his summer house to the Swedes’ armor school, and thence to Stockholm. The problem is simple and basic. The tanker is expected to come up with skills more and more like those of a pilot while enjoying a lifestyle not too different from that of an infantryman in a wet foxhole. In the field, he mostly has to live on his tank. This can be an advantage; but often it deprives him of the comforts of farm buildings, pubs or chateaux. As the defender facing an NBC threat, he is expected to spend days buttoned-up cheek by jowl with the rest of the crew-and then to come up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, burning for battle.

What I want to do is to mull over some aspects of this whole problem that may not have struck you, or that you may even have deliberately shut out of your minds. This may help you to get across to designers and representatives users-trials crews and their bosses-what you a h -ally want. The German word benutzer freundlich (”user-friendly”) has become an “in” term in the computer world. To win battles, gentlemen, you need “user-friendly” tanks. 20 ARMOR In the past, you may recall, I raised the delicate subject of the “deputy commander”-the guy we now call the gunner-taking over the tank or whatever in a tactical emergency. This aroused more excitement in British reviews than anything else in my book. So maybe we should take a look at discipline.

It only struck me quite recently that the form and style of tank fire orders in every army I know is based on the traditional infantry section fire order. Give them hands-off intercoms, give them override, give them computers, give them monitors-gunnery instructors still stick their heads out, lean back, and shout (or at least ours do). Compare this with the dialogue between the pilot and bombardier of a bomber-a totally Merent way of achieving the same thing under increasingly similar circumstances. Many of you will have heard or read the Bundeswehr presentation on “mission-type control”-another of these chunks of German which has caught on. The work I’ve been doing for your War College in preparation for next week’s symposium there leads me to think that mission-type control is both the point of departure for, and the key to, the type of warfare envisioned in FM-100-5, and the AirLand battle.

I suggest, too, that mission-type control needs to extend right down to tank-crew level. And the basis of it is trust-mutual confidence. This is what you see in a good aircrew-surely it’s what you need both in the crew of a modern tank and at the lower tactical levels of command. I don’t want to pursue the C3 aspect now, but this approach largely solves the problem of discipline within a crew forced to live in extreme intimacy and to share out the chores. As I see it, though, trying to get this balance right leads one back into the basic aims and techniques of training. We all know the gung-hoism-“aggressive motivation” is your term for it, I think-on which the training of your own, ours and France’s paratroops, along with your Marines, is based. We all know how excellently it works, too. The aims are instant obedience, extreme physical courage, toughness and stamina. Gung-hoism is fashionable in both our armies at this time. I just wonder, though, whether this is the way to build first-rate crews for machines like Ml Abrams.

The other option stems, I guess, from cavalry tradition and, for us British at least, from General Sir John Moore and his riflemen. Prince Philip gave it a powerful boost, under the name of “expedition training,” when he was serving in the Navy. And the British Army took it up because it matched their thinking about the importance of remnants on the nuclear battlefield. Nowadays you mostly call it “evasion and escape.” Just to be different, we call it “escape and evasion.”

The basic technique is to provide a general physical and psychological environment in which sound men will develop their characters to the full, and be motivated to maximize their skills. Superimposed on this general environment are a series of special environments, designed to bring on particular qualities and aptitudes; to evoke particular types of crisis-response; and to give men a chance t prove themselves. These special environments need to involve a significant risk to life, and to present situations which can only be dealt with by interdependence and teamwork.

On that note, let’s get back to the crew in their tank. As I mentioned this morning, I’ve never seen tank crews evaluated in financial terms the way aircrews are. The nearest I could get to it with ballpark figuring was that the worth of a trained crew in dollars might be around half that of their machine. But, as it’s all too easy to forget in peacetime, a crew good enough to pull something out of the bag may be a battlewinning asset. And-as Afghanistan and the Middle East show-a battleexperienced tank or aircraft crew is a pearl beyond price.

Keeping Dollars in Perspective But let’s get dollar costs in perspective too. You have to set aside conventional notions and be rational here. Some of the things I suggested in my last book and am going to talk about now sound extravagant and have been criticized as such. But they’re not even a flake of skin on a peanut compared to the real value of a modem tank and its crew-especially of a tank-crew system tactically deployed where it needs to be.

In a defensive posture, a retrograde movement, or any type of maneuver warfare, one needs to think very hard about crew survival. A well-trained tanker’s instinct is to stay with his tank. But once he’s unhorsed, what he really needs to do is to get away from it, and make his way back to safety. Clothing and personal kit suitable for tanking is apt to be disastrous for walking and living rough. As anybody who takes the trouble to try both for themselves can see, the two requirements are poles apart. There just is no good compromise, but the answer is simple. Each crewman needs a survival pack-literally, a rucksack-stowed in a readily accessible outside bin. I spelled out the contents of this pack in the book. It is neither difficult nor expensive to provide an unhorsed tanker with dedicated clothing and equipment that give him the best possible chance of surviving, and rejoining his unit to fight again.

Let’snow turn to the problem of getting tankers into battle really fit. As we all know, living on a tank out of contact and away from NBC threat can be very agreeable. And so it should be. Crews that live well, fight well; and life on his tank may be the nearest a tanker in the field will get to R&R for quite awhile. Fantastic as it looks at first sight, the aim should surely be to provide him with a standard of amenity and comfort equivalent to that of, say, a fast patrol boat.

Here it pays to look at the negative side first. We all know about the basic motions of a tank-roll, pitch, yaw and bounce. But there’s another one I only learned about from Sven Berge three years back; and I just wonder how many of you know about it. The Swedes discvered it because the long tracked marches they do on mobilization were producing unacceptable crew fatigue. Even with rubber-shod and rubber-bushed tracks, there is a high-frequency vibration dependent on speed and the pitch of the track link. This is not consciously perceived by the crew, but is very hard to get rid of before it reaches their spines. Even with the modern emphasis on human engineering, there is, I suspect, a significant and avoidable residue of vibrations, noises, fumes, and sharp edges. Another thing which is very bad both for morale and for physical well-being is dirt. We all know that half-inch or so of oily, gritty bilgewater that swirls around on top of the belly plate. We’ve all seen crews remounting literally covered in mud after replacing a track they’ve thrown on a muddy sideslope. When crews live for long periods in the field-as they seldom do in peacetime-diesel rash and the like become chronic. Well-trained soldiers always do their damnedest to keep themselves clean. But when you’re living on a tank, with a limited water supply, in a muddy or dusty environment, it just can’t be done. 21 If designers went out and experienced this for themselves, and then got together with experienced and articulate users, the dirt problem could be solved with minimal design or cost penalties. If you think about it, the answer is a mixture of overclothing, external bins, and thorough drills-rather like NBC decontamination, in fact. Turning to the positive side, I want to stress that in almost all these human factors problems, military expe diency and personal well-being march hand in hand. The notion that they conflict is a relic of the drill square. Suppose, for instance, that tanks have to remain concealed in forest or mountain terrain. You can get the tank just so far into the edge of the wood or up a gully, but seldom as far as you want. Or, if you tuck it up too tight, the refueler can’t get at it, or whatever. Nonetheless, with a mixture of native wit, natural materials and nets, you can hide it fairly well-as long as the crew aren’t constantly moving around it.

They can get themselves a few meters further into the wood or up the gully, into complete cover. So, by giving them facilities to live in comfort off the tank, including remotes for communications, you get good concealment and a relaxed and happy crew.

Likewise, having provided good facilities for living away from the tank, it is not hard to make these adaptable for equal comfort when concealment is no problem, and ground or weather make the engine deck the best place to sleep.

In this talk I can only throw up a few examples of the ways to get tank crews into battle physically and psychologically fit. But before I turn to the much more severe problem of waiting buttoned-up under NBC threat, let me remind you once again of my fast patrol boat analogy. In tackling the buttoned-up problem one needs to cast a pretty jaundiced eye on the term “NBC.” I believe you could keep a tank crew buttoned up under armor for a week or ten days. But no way can you keep a maneuver squad or a C3 team in their sardine can that long. There’s always 22 going to be enough warning-or at least indirect indication-of nuclear attack to get these people under armor. So what we are really talking about is a high-grade chemical threat-hydrogen cyanide and a mix of persistent and nonpersistent nerve agents. This means we can hold these large squads, or whatever, in comfort and collective protection outside armor, as long as they can mount without delay or exposure. I dealt with this in the book, but for now I’ll stick to tanks and other smallcrew armored vehicles.

Fact is, the problem of long waiting periods under NBC threat is one nobody cares to face up to. We all train, more or less conscientiously, to fight in protective clothing, both in armored vehicles and outside them. But we hardly even pay lipservice to the prospect of days of buttoned-up inactivity before the battle starts, This problem of undergoing a prolonged and stressful experience before the real mission starts is, I suggest, unique to tank crews. Even divers, submariners and astro-nauts don’t have to cope with it in quite the same way. But I’m convinced that, with future armored vehicles at least, it can be faced up to and solved on acceptable terms. As you may have gathered, I’m not exactly a traditionalist; but as a soldier I am dead against tank crews being selected like aircrews are. By contrast, in face of a chemical threat, tank crews have to be given something very like aircrew status in the field. In simple terms, once they’re in their machines, they mustn’t get out again unless the risk of actual or potential contamination is zero. In my book I went into the logistic asp& of this in detail, and the thing can be made to work at no great cost to anything. The second point before we get down to the nitty-gritty is this. Both crew and tank must leave their hiding place fit for battle. Among other things, this means the fuel and water tanks must be full. The tank’s subsystems will have to be exercised and the batteries kept charged. And a plentiful water supply is maybe the greatest single factor in crew comfort. It would be dead simple to provide fuel and water for use in the hide from a “deployment roof pack” for tanks, and a “deployment trailer” for largecrew vehicles, both to be left in the hide. The cost is relatively minute. But does any NATO army have such a thing? Has any NATO armored user asked for it?

Now let’s look at the problem of three men, not of one another’s choosing, cooped up in a stationary tin box for 10 days and waiting to go into action for the first time. In terms of crew compartment layout, there are two ways of going about it. One, which arose by happy accident in our Centurion tank with its large loader’s space, is what one might call the “solitaire game.” In more recently and efficiently designed tanks, even contortionist midgets would be pushed to play this.

But in a turret-less layout, with the crew sideby-side in the hull, each crewman has a micrehome of his own. Once again I explored this in detail in the book, and I think demonstrated it could work. The key points were perhaps these.

By adapting a commercial design used in very small yachts and houseboats, a washbasin and toilet can be incorporated in each seat. Given ample water, it is simple to flush body wastes, food waste, tissues and so on out of the tank, preferably into a pit.

Next, I suggest, come modesty and privacy, along with control of light and noise. This is easily arranged by having a detachable curtain on either side of the center station; switches on the interior lamps; a lightweight induction loop earpiece with a switch on it; and a switch on the In the Nineties, if not now, the problem of living with tanks, even of lying up in hides under NBC threat, can be licked in practicable and affordable ways. Following the moktor;nit.

Havine: overcome the basic drawbacks, one can start getting positive. And once again I’d like stress the way military requirements and amenities go hand in hand. It would cost only a few dollars to build into the radio installation a simple VHF/FM broadcast receiver and a changeover switch to put broadcast programs onto one of the subsidiary channels of the harness. With suitable precautions over electronic and verbal security, commanders could use this facility for briefing and moraleboosting. You’ll almost certainly have an audio cassette player in the tank to handle the software for the on-board computer. Link this to the amplifier of the broadcast receiver, and you have a typical car radio facility for free. Likewise, throw in a hundred dollars or so of videotape playback as an input to the image processor system, and it’s getting to be real home away from home. These audio and video aids can also be used for silent training of many kinds, likewise for silent exercising of the vehicle sub systems.

And so you come to what I see as the clue.to going out of hides into battle with fit crews in fit tanks. With these facilities and aids, you can put together a routine of living, training, and maintenance not too different from the soldier’s normal day. Given this, I reckon one could stay in hides for as long as 10 days without needing support from drugs.

Let me close on this aspect with another example of the kind of thinking I’m out to provoke. One thing I didn’t cover was physical exercise. This would have to be mainly isometric. But isometric exercises are boring, and can be damaging unless they are tuned to the individual’s physique. So why not make one of the perks of qualifying as a crewman a videotape of an individual isometric program worked out and recorded by an attractive and supportive physical education instructress. Well, why not? This personalized and animated pin-up would cost only a few dollars and take up only a few cubic inches of stowage space. same line-of thought, you can go on to make sure you go into battle with fit, highly-trained, and highly-motivated crews. All that is needed is a mental somersault in the minds that matter. And for NATO I guess that means right here at the “Home of Armor.’’ Sure, there will be a battle with designers, with financiers, with traditionalists, regrettably even with some who have been brought up on tanks but have forgotten the view from the cupola. May I leave you with just one thought which, for me at least, clinches the issue. What matters about a tank is not the performance which is designed and engineered into it. It is not the performance that a hand-picked trials crew, living in comfort and backed by all the facilities of Fort Knox or Aberdeen, can get out of it. It is what a slightly below-par regular crew can do with their machine after they-and it-have spent several weeks in a landing ship, disembarked through surf, rolled for a week across desert in summer, and sat buttoned-up for another week in a mountain gully. RICHARD SIMPKIN, whose long British Army career includes wartime service in the Middle East, later had extensive responsibility for armored vehicle development, including involvement in the Chieftain, Scorpion, and Anglo-German MBT programs. A frequent ARMOR contributor, he is the author of several recent books on armor-related topics. 23