I would have to agree. Assuming that "Mini-Abrams" = FCS and the Puma is a good template for the FCS, then the use of the rubber band track is probably the major difference. Adopting the rubber track and using a "kit" approach to uparmor to threats, has got lots of logistics issues that I don't think anyone has really addressed.
Lets look at the armor issue and what effect adopting things like kits and band track have:
A year or so ago, I wrote a small paper on a proposed AFV and had it circulated at the Command College for a bit of feedback. I was stunned by the poor reception to armor kits. Most of these guys were Majors (a few Colonels) and to a man they absolutely hated the "kit a, kit b, kit c "approach that you see the US Army and Marines adopting with their new vehicles.
The reason? Logistics. It is simply a pain in the a$$ to bring these kits online in the field and takes up a huge amount of time retorfitting it to vehicles that have been in-country for a few months. Things break on these vehicles ( normal wear and tear) and they get in field repairs which then makes the kit not fit. So the teams end up having to work backwards and repair the repair and then apply the kit, but oh then some of the kits are not packed properly and you are missing components. Result? It can quickly become a major pain to apply a kit to one vehicle and you can easily find yourself days behind schedule. Just one vehicle can have a disproportionate effect on your manpower.
So then how do you solve this problem? The army is going for longer lasting tracks, but those band tracks are segmented. That is a different sort of fish to the normal track and I guess you have to find someone who worked on an Ontoss or some crazy vehicle like that to learn the tricks of thre trade to replace those track sements quickly.
Another way to get around this problem is , well, to forget kits. I know, I know, I am going to be struck down for suggesting it, but isn't the Puma design kind of stepping along those lines already? Its very heavy to begin with. It still has kits but not to the extent of a USA FCS. Why not go one step further and actually think about customizing the vehicle to spec on the factory floor?
That means developing capacity to actually retool to a spec on the fly. Something US industry can't do at the moment, but what if you could? The biggest gripe about the Iraq-saga is the USA industrial complex's inabilty to respond to the changing tactical environment. MRAP is a symptom of this.
Takes months, years to build a bigger truck, but maybe a few days for the enemy to build a bigger bomb to suit said truck.
So, I feel the answer is actually here, on the shop floor, rather then out there , emptying sand out of your boots. Or bringing the shop floor closer to the people with the sandy boots.
So, in this regard, I have a very watchful eye on the FCS program. It doesn't address any of the issues that I have spoken about, other then RFPs for longer lasting bits and pieces. The end game is that the Army will think it can down size on its maintenance guys (one of the desired paradigms of transformation) but find itself short when all of a sudden they want to use kits to suit the tactical environment and over strain the maintenance guys they have left that survived that downsizing.
my 2c
cheers
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