THEN & NOW
representatives—Japan, Great Britain, Spain, Australia, South Korea and Israel. Te January-February 2000 issue noted that “COL Bruce Jette, PM Soldier, and COL Henry L. Kinnison, TRADOC Systems Manager for the Soldier, received special MANPRINT Achievement Awards for their work in refining and clarifying the requirements for the Land Warrior System.”
4 Power—whether that means gasoline, kerosene,
batteries, natural gas, electricity generation or even food—has always been a factor in the
success of the Army. That is especially true in remote and austere locations. The MH-1A was intended to help with that. What was it?
A. The first mobile, shipborne solar panel farm, which generated approximately 3 megawatts of power.
B. A ship designed to harvest wave energy from the ocean waves, which was said to be ahead of its time and ultimately failed.
C. A World War II-era ship with its propulsion system removed and replaced with a nuclear reactor suffi- cient to power thousands of homes.
D. An award-winning technology from the 1960s that converted waste paper to glucose.
Answer: C. Te Army contracted for the MH-1A Sturgis in 1961 and accepted the shipborne nuclear reactor, built into a Liberty class ship from World War II, in 1967. At that time, it was moored in Gunston Cove at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, near the SM-1, the land-based electricity-generating nuclear reactor once used for Army nuclear training at Fort Belvoir. Te Sturgis had its propulsion system removed and was essentially a barge. Te power plant traveled to the Panama Canal to help make up for electricity shortages, where it remained until the mid-1970s until it was towed back to Fort Belvoir to be denuclearized and deacti- vated. Disposal of the ship was finally completed in 2019. Tere was a program in the 1960s that turned waste paper to glucose, but it wasn’t the MH-1A.
5 The Army killed the mule in the summer of
2011—that is, it killed the MULE program (Multifunction Utility Logistics and Equipment
vehicle). That MULE was one of the systems within the Future Combat Systems. It just killed another one—more accurately, it decided to recompete for the squad multi- purpose equipment transport vehicle. Still, the idea of a mule vehicle continues with the Next Generation Combat
Vehicle program. “The Army has long desired a robotic mule,” noted a National Defense Magazine article on Jan. 8.
Despite having killed at least one, the Army still likes mules. Which of the following was not among the Army’s mules?
A. The Gama Goat B. Actual mules C. The Modular Universal (MULE) program
D. The M274 Mule E. All of the above.
Answer: A. Te Gama Goat—a six-wheeled articulated vehicle named for the inventor of the articulated joint that enabled it (Gamaunt) and its sure-footed mountain goat-like performance in rough terrain—was a vehicle in its own right. Actual mules are about as surefooted as goats but better at hauling. Maybe that’s why they’re used in the Grand Canyon.
Te M274 was a mule, but not an actual one. It was developed by Willys, the same folks who gave us the original Jeep, and it not only could be ridden like a truck, the steering wheel could be flipped over, as an article in the magazine in 1988 about Yuma Proving Ground (YPG), Arizona, noted. “In the 1960s YPG tested an Army and Marine Corps cargo hauler propelled by a ‘20-mule-power’ air-cooled cylinder engine. It could be driven from a hard little seat, or after flipping the steering wheel around, from the ground when the terrain was too rough to ride.” Tat’s according to the author, Fran Northon, who was the Automo- tive Systems Engineering Section chief from October 1983 to May 1988 at YPG. He mentions a fair number of other interest- ing concepts demonstrated at YPG, which included 130-pound bulletproof tires that achieved their ballistic protection with some kind of foam. As Northon tells it, the tires seriously altered a vehi- cle’s handling, turning the wheels into gyroscopes. During the Apollo program era, the M274 was considered as a potential vehi- cle platform for the lunar rover in the Army Vehicle Lunarization Study, released in April 1966.
Te laser program was an outlier in mule terms, but still a MULE. —STEVE STARK
Laser Equipment
https://asc.ar my.mil
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