The Crusade For Crusader- The Army is making another pitch to keep its heavy Crusader self-propelled armored howitzer on track for production. The idea they are promoting is that medium brigades composed of light vehicles can only work if there is some kind of ultimate killer on the battlefield that can destroy any target too heavy for the lightweight armored cars to fight. Medium Brigade proponents have insisted that their light units will work because information warfare would ensure that they knew where every enemy is, and could avoid some of them while destroying others with artillery. The Army is trying to show that Crusader would be superior to the Paladin because it is better protected, more mobile (after it arrives in the theater), has better range, better accuracy, more lethality, and can be reloaded faster. All of this would add up to more shells being fired in a given day by Crusader than by Paladin, and more of those shells landing on the target. With more accuracy, each fire mission could do the job with fewer shells, and that would mean more fire missions per day out of a given number of guns.--Stephen V Cole