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CNN Saturday Morning News
U.S. Army Trains to Cope With Freezing Temperatures
Aired January 26, 2002 - 08:53 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: From the warmth of Australia now to one of the coldest places on earth, the Alaskan interior. The U.S. Army is conducting exercises there to learn how to fight in the cold.
And as CNN's Beth Nissen shows us, it's no easy task.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
BETH NISSEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): This is the U.S. Army's cold region test center in the Alaskan interior, two hours drive from Fairbanks.
Temperatures here average minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit between October and April. How cold is that? Well, watch what happens to hot water when it hits air that's 30 degrees below zero.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It'll turn into ice crystals because of the cold.
NISSEN: Arctic air, blowing snow, hard frozen ground can stop a military mission cold.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have to be able to fight in a cold environment. All the equipment, from clothing to the vehicle to generators, everything has to be tested in the cold, and everything has to be able to work in the cold.
NISSEN: Almost everything an army uses is affected by extreme cold, especially vehicles. Common motor oil congeals to the consistency of a hockey puck. Hydraulic fluids freeze. Batteries die in trucks, in sensors, in navigation equipment.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Battery life is degraded from 100 percent at room temperature to about 10 percent in this type of environment, in minus 30 degrees.
NISSEN: Get a vehicle going, and there are often problems stopping it. Brakes freeze up, fail. Traction is a major problem. When first tested, even the M-1 tank, which weighs 50 tons, would spin its treads on snow and ice. Test officers recommended a design change.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We developed an ice cleat to keep it from to keep it from sliding, which works very well. NISSEN: Test officers recommended several modifications on the armored security vehicle.
(on camera): This is the kind of vehicle used for peacekeeping?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes. Currently there are 18 of them over in Kosovo.
NISSEN (voice-over): One cold-weather problem, the shock absorber that helps lift the vehicle's heavy armored door.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shock absorbers of any type are a real high failure rate in the cold.
NISSEN (on camera): And what happens if those seals fail?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, if that seal fails and you're trying to open this door and all of a sudden you have 150 pounds thrown at you, it can cause injuries to personnel.
NISSEN (voice-over): The solution?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can see the coil spring here? They're going to add coil springs down here that won't fail in the cold.
NISSEN: At firing ranges on the test center's remote 670,000 acres, weapons and munitions are tested.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Is it going to come out of a tube properly? Is there going to be frost build up? Is there going to be, is there going to be a cloud that will obscure it?
NISSEN: Remember what happened to hot water when it hit very cold air? In tests of the Apache helicopter, something similar happened when the Apache fired its missiles.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The propellant used created an incredible obscurant in front of the helicopter and the pilots actually would lose visibility for a short period of time.
NISSEN: The solution, change the propellant and train pilots to change altitude after firing a missile. Humans are the key factor in most every test.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Well, obviously, almost every piece of equipment we have in the army, except for maybe some unmanned aerial vehicles, has a has a person behind it.
NISSEN: A person in harm's way. And harm can take many forms. The U.S. military learned harsh lessons during the Korean War. More than half the troops who came off the front lines were casualties of cold, not enemy fire.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We've learned from that and that's one of the reasons the cold regions test center is here. NISSEN: Soldiers' cold weather uniforms are tested layer by layer to see if boots can keep feet warm even while wading through icy streams or if an Arctic parka hood is big enough to fit over a helmet. Special attention is paid to gloves and mittens.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: To put these gloves through their paces, we have soldiers, marines, airmen, navy personnel. We put thermal couplers on the soldiers' fingers and we put them outside at minus 25. We do a variety of things.
NISSEN: Such as shooting weapons, working communications gear, trying to do basic repairs and maintenance, not easy when you're wearing something that's a cross between an oven mitt and a carpet sample. But soldiers who took their Arctic mittens off for a minute or two risked misplacing them or getting them wet in snow. The solution, a U.S. military issue mitten string.
NISSEN (on camera): That's a pretty low-tech solution to...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is, but it works.
NISSEN: Just a string around the neck, like when you were a kid?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes, ma'am.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Our equipment can't let down the soldier. If it doesn't work, then the soldier's going to find themselves in a survival situation. The best thing we can do is to provide the equipment that'll best suit the mission in the cold.
NISSEN: Beth Nissen, CNN, in the Alaskan interior.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
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