Blasting the Crusader

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The Army learned the importance of speed in Kosovo, where it was humiliated when it took a month to ship 24 Apache helicopters 800 miles from Germany to Albania. It vowed to transform itself into a lighter fighting force. It is spending $4 billion for a fleet of light, wheeled armored vehicles to be carried to battle aboard moderate-size but plentiful C-130 cargo planes. To keep the Crusader relevant, the Army wants to shrink the two-vehicle system from its current 110 tons to a relatively svelte 80 tons. But each system will still require a gigantic C-5 or C-17 cargo plane to ferry it to war in a hurry--and each is in extremely short supply.

The Crusader's woes won't end even if the gun manages to find its way to faraway runways. In the U.S. military's two most recent wars--against Iraq and Yugoslavia--Army officers were leery of pushing their tanks to Baghdad or Belgrade over flimsy bridges. If orders had come to take those capitals, engineers would have had to spend weeks reinforcing the spans or putting up new ones, hardly a blueprint for a blitzkrieg.

"The Crusader seems to fit a world that is now passing from the scene much more than the one that is now emerging," says Andrew Krepinevich, an ex-Army officer who directs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank. Increasing numbers of enemy missiles will render slower U.S. weapons vulnerable as they lumber to the front. "Crusader, with its bulk and sizable logistics tail," he says, "will not likely fare well in such an environment."

Some Army officers wonder if artillery soon will be eclipsed by better technology. The idea of lobbing shells through a mobile, rifled cannon hasn't changed much since World War I. Its goal remains to disrupt, not destroy, the enemy. But with every war, new kinds of ever cheaper, ever smarter munitions--guided precisely into their targets by satellites or aircraft--become the kings of the battlefield. They can kill, not merely scare, the enemy.

But the Crusader has another constituency, perhaps more powerful than its Pentagon backers: United Defense, the company building the system, is owned by the Carlyle Group, a privately held corporation run by a host of former Reagan and Bush Administration officials. They include Reagan's Pentagon chief, Frank Carlucci, and James Baker, George Bush's Secretary of State and the man who helped George W. win his election struggle in Florida. United Defense has decided to assemble the gun in a factory expressly built for the program near the artillery school at Fort Sill, Okla. The fort is represented in Congress by g.o.p. Senator James Inhofe, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Representative J.C. Watts, a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the House's fourth-ranking Republican. Both have exhorted the Army to buy the Crusader. To help fund it, the Army plans next month to ask for $500 million in the Pentagon's 2002 budget.