5/3/2002 [EXTRA]: Crusader Self-Propelled Howitzer

[Hubris Boy]

Yeah... Oooh. Aaaah. Ain't that cool? Guess what? Don Rumsfeld wants to cancel the Crusader acquisition program. And he's right.

Crusader is another one of those government projects that continues to stagger forward, zombie-like, despite anyone's best efforts to kill it. They've already spent over ten years and $11 billion developing this damn thing and it STILL isn't operational.

Now, I'll grant you, it's a pretty spiffy piece of hardware. I understand the need for self-propelled artillery... the Paladin system's getting a little long in the tooth, and conventional towed artillery just can't keep up with a mechanized unit when it's moving forward (or backward, depending on how things are going that day.)

But the operational idea for this thing was originally developed to help stop Warsaw Pact tanks from pouring through the Fulda Gap. The idea was to base most of them in Europe and leave them there, because they're too damn heavy to move around quickly. Most of the threats the US Army is likely to face today won't need to be "softened up" by the kind of sustained artillery support that Crusader is designed to deliver. What a terrible f*ckin' waste of money. The MLRS does almost everything this piece of shit can do, and it's already in service.

pant...pant...pant... Ahem. Sorry about that. I get a little worked up sometimes. And no, NBN, the name's got nothing to do with pissing off the Arabs.