Yes?
The Electric Army
- Thread starter redbone3
- Start date
The article said army is going electric OR HYBRID, so you use hybrid in colder climate. Problem?
Comic levels of stupidity.
I have a better idea to combat (fictional) "climate change." How about stop funding and fighting pointless wars? I've seen what combat does to an environment, and it ain't pretty. The usage of fuels alone to transport men/equipment and fight wars, for GWOT alone, must have been enormous. Then you have the destruction of vehicles, buildings, landscape, trees, all devastating to environmental calculations.
I have a better idea to combat (fictional) "climate change." How about stop funding and fighting pointless wars? I've seen what combat does to an environment, and it ain't pretty. The usage of fuels alone to transport men/equipment and fight wars, for GWOT alone, must have been enormous. Then you have the destruction of vehicles, buildings, landscape, trees, all devastating to environmental calculations.
I don't get it. Use JP8 (similar to kerosene) to generate hydrogen to run a fuel cell in a tank. No green. The M1 can run just dandy on the JP8 right now.
Generals (and Presidents) always prepare to fight the last war.
In the next war the 'front line' will be a bunch of concentric circles with all of us and everybody else in the center.
When there are major deployments all those vehicles have to get there somehow, either by air or land or sea. The weight of the batteries on a hybrid will affect the loading of the ship or aircraft.
Then you have to account for training on new systems for maintenance and repairs. It’s a lot more to all this than just saying we are replacing internal combustion vehicular with hybrid or electric.
All I can say is Hahahaha.
I recently talked to my niece's husband who is a Major in the Air Force. I questioned our ability to fight a war after giving all that stuff to Ukraine and the Taliban. He said that yes we could still fight a war but that the American people were going to have to adjust to a greater number of casualties. Instead of the news reporting the loss of 26 soldiers in an attack or accident, we would be hearing about thousands everyday. And that's not going nuclear. So debate these distractions all you want but we better stay out of wars.
Agreed. These idiots at the top focused on this or that nonsense pet projects have failed to comphrehend and prepare for actual war fighting for at least a decade, and the morally/intellectually bankrupt leaders have not convincingly won wars in generations against far lesser opponents. Sad, but true. Debate that if you can give real examples where that is the wrong assessment.
The American public has no stomach for the losses we would receive, including civilian targets, if/when we fight an actual peer, a capable enemy that has peer technology, weaponry, etc. capable of striking and leveling US cities, entire military bases, etc. We haven't seen that since WWII, and even then the homeland was largely insulated from being struck. Now peer enemies can hit and hit hard with no adequate warnings.
But yeah, we're going to save the environment by throwing out a trillion in equipment, and then replace by ravishing the environment for lithium and make battery powered tanks. The dumbest hairbrain distraction but I'm not surprised given the state of the world.
There hasn't been any suggestion about going 100% electric for everything including tanks. It's been about going EV for "non-tactical" ground vehicles. Not tanks or armored personnel carriers. But anyone who has been to a military base will have seen the sheer number of vehicles they have just in terms of cars and transport vehicles for on-base use or perhaps for official use going off base.
There's talk about a hybrid drive system for actual fighting vehicles, and frankly that makes a ton of sense. I don't see what the problem might be with that.
The Pentagon is developing a “sustainability plan,” part of which will be focused on developing a zero emissions non-tactical vehicle fleet.
“Currently the Department of Defense has about 170,000 non-tactical vehicles — the cars and trucks we use on our bases,” Hicks noted.
“That’s the largest fleet in the federal government, next to the U.S. Postal Service. Our success in transitioning this massive fleet to zero emissions, most of which will be electric, will depend on America’s auto industry and autoworkers right here in Detroit.”
General Motors has committed to investing $35 billion in advanced vehicle technologies, to include power and propulsion systems for electric vehicles, noted Steve DuMont, president of GM Defense. The parent company plans to have 30-plus EVs in its product offerings by 2035.
“All of that has relevance to what our defense customers are looking at,” he told National Defense. “If you look at the non-tactical vehicles that are used in a [military] base or installation environment, to me that’s just low hanging fruit.”
There's talk about a hybrid drive system for actual fighting vehicles, and frankly that makes a ton of sense. I don't see what the problem might be with that.
You can start with these.
Wasteful, needless, less proven for reliability, quite probably more complex and expensive. US spends a trillion annually already on MIC. Shall we waste more money? In what way does this "benefit" us? So our Bradley fighting vehicles are all scrapped, and new ones built? At tens of millions each?
I think it depends on what it means by less reliable and wasteful. If a commercial vehicle use the same powertrain as a military version and there is a hybrid, they can drop in the military version and test it to a harsher environment, and see if they can save some fuel with it.
May cost a few M to test but if it cuts fuel use for the base by 10% (bus, trucks, vans, etc in a "safe" base like Okinawa or within the US), then it is worth doing. Nobody says you have to use the same engine for the tanks and the vans, so why not try putting hybrids in some of them?
The comments on tanks are to get a rise out of people. Most of the electrification will be on the state-side vehicles that rarely leave the pavement.
These idiots bring a whole new level of madness to the playing field. There seems to be no end to their lunacy.
The entire ecosystem is expensive, far more than saving marginal amounts of fuel in the limited vehicles proposed.
I was deployed. The up-armored Humvees pushed those big diesel engines and transmissions to their limits and they were under constant repairs. Even the civilian up-armored GMC Suburbans weighed I think a couple thousand pounds more with armor. Contractors and government officials drove around in these. And considering that battery vehicles weigh about 30% more than ICE peers, you're talking about serious weight. Note that many 2nd and 3rd world nations do not have roads and infrastructure to handle heavy vehicles.
I don't think there's any possible way one might put EV or hybrid power supplies in anything requiring armor. So that limits it to basic unarmored vehicles, which are confined to pavement roles. Not a lot.
Then there's entire new designs, new mechanic training, new supply chains, new, new, new, new, ad nauseum which means more tax dollars on stupidly unnecessary things. So we can theoretically "save the planet" with our warfighting equipment. It's all utter nonsense.
That's not what Elizabeth warren said.
Sure. I suppose we should have stayed with proven biplane technology and not have gone to these unnecessary jet engines. I mean, that required training of new mechanics, pilots, etc. And none of this glass cockpit stuff. We should probably go back to steam gauges.
I mean, there’s no way to possibly innovate is there? I guess we have to stick with proven technology like carburetors and mechanical steering. And steam cats for the new Ford-class carriers.
Politics?
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