"The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards."
This is one great flick. Kelsey Grammer does a great job as the acquisition official who is more concerned about pleasing others and CAry Elwes is the AF officer who beats his head against the wall as he attempts to correct the deficiencies of the program. Great to view if you plan on working in acquisition and/or logistics in your career.
I love this movie, and agree with everything in it. The GO's are venal, vapid, and vain. The Pentagon reindeer games are hilariously funny because they are viciously accurate. However, the one flaw in the flick is... The Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle is simply the best infantry vehicle ever created. All that shit the mildly retarded GOs tacked onto it WORKED. Never mentioned is the electronically stabilized firing platform, which lets the vehicle run wide open (at between 40 and 45 mph) over broken terrain and hit everything it is aiming at. As a former Bradley PL, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to state the the Bradley is, quite simply, awesome. The 25mm chain gun, the TOW missile launcher, the then state-of-the-art day and night optics, gave the infantry an unheralded advantage on the battlefield. Okay, the port firing positions were always kind of ridiculous and never were redeemed in action. Still, the Bradley changed the infantry paradigm (which the film never acknowledges) and infantrymen were no longer accurately referred to as "crunchies." Sometimes, you gotta do a Paul Harvey and figure out the rest of the story. Once, at NTC, my driver got an impact ARCOM from the BDE CDR for traversing Alpha-Bravo Pass (crosswise, fucking up the entire enemy scheme of maneuver); a feat no Bradley was supposed to be able to do. I, uh, meanwhile, got a world class wire-brushing that basically said "don't ever pull no shit like that again." I'll debate anyone, anywhere on the mission efficacy of the Bradley.
I'll agree with the Boss that the final version of the Bradley is a fine vehicle. Except cutting down the size of the squad to accomodate the vehicle's requirements was BS. The thing is, it took 25 years and way too much money to get there. Would have been nice to get to the final product without wasting so much time and money.
It was an overengineered system and the program office did cheat to get past the test and evaluation people. Oh, and I was at Ft Benning when the Bradley test vehicle became a submersible. Took a while for the Army to live that one down.
Did any of you ever read the book by the Air Force officer in charge of the OPEVAL. This was no funny story. His effort to insure survivability was adequately put in and actually tested was heroic.
If the Bradley is worth anything, the Army owes him a lot. Read the book.
4 comments:
This is one great flick. Kelsey Grammer does a great job as the acquisition official who is more concerned about pleasing others and CAry Elwes is the AF officer who beats his head against the wall as he attempts to correct the deficiencies of the program. Great to view if you plan on working in acquisition and/or logistics in your career.
I love this movie, and agree with everything in it. The GO's are venal, vapid, and vain. The Pentagon reindeer games are hilariously funny because they are viciously accurate.
However, the one flaw in the flick is...
The Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle is simply the best infantry vehicle ever created. All that shit the mildly retarded GOs tacked onto it WORKED. Never mentioned is the electronically stabilized firing platform, which lets the vehicle run wide open (at between 40 and 45 mph) over broken terrain and hit everything it is aiming at.
As a former Bradley PL, I feel that it is incumbent upon me to state the the Bradley is, quite simply, awesome. The 25mm chain gun, the TOW missile launcher, the then state-of-the-art day and night optics, gave the infantry an unheralded advantage on the battlefield. Okay, the port firing positions were always kind of ridiculous and never were redeemed in action. Still, the Bradley changed the infantry paradigm (which the film never acknowledges) and infantrymen were no longer accurately referred to as "crunchies."
Sometimes, you gotta do a Paul Harvey and figure out the rest of the story.
Once, at NTC, my driver got an impact ARCOM from the BDE CDR for traversing Alpha-Bravo Pass (crosswise, fucking up the entire enemy scheme of maneuver); a feat no Bradley was supposed to be able to do. I, uh, meanwhile, got a world class wire-brushing that basically said "don't ever pull no shit like that again."
I'll debate anyone, anywhere on the mission efficacy of the Bradley.
I'll agree with the Boss that the final version of the Bradley is a fine vehicle. Except cutting down the size of the squad to accomodate the vehicle's requirements was BS. The thing is, it took 25 years and way too much money to get there. Would have been nice to get to the final product without wasting so much time and money.
It was an overengineered system and the program office did cheat to get past the test and evaluation people. Oh, and I was at Ft Benning when the Bradley test vehicle became a submersible. Took a while for the Army to live that one down.
Did any of you ever read the book by the Air Force officer in charge of the OPEVAL. This was no funny story. His effort to insure survivability was adequately put in and actually tested was heroic.
If the Bradley is worth anything, the Army owes him a lot. Read the book.
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