CBRN Reconnaissance: Obsolete or Omnipresent?

摘要

Throughout the Cold War era, CBRN recce technology lagged behind the actual doctrine. In reality, in the 1950s and 1960s, it was RN recce as portable radiation detection technology was more advanced, cheaper, and more available than comparable chemical or biological detection. Much CBRN recce doctrine evolved out of the tactical nuclear battlefield - the idea that radioactive contamination from use of battlefield nuclear weapons needed to be tracked and monitored. It was only in the 1970s that technology for chemical detection passed beyond the rudimentary stage. Even to this day, the capability to conduct biological recce is largely notional. The classical CBRN recon platform was usually a lightly armed and armoured vehicle, often a variant of an existing recce vehicle platform. For much of the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies used the BRDM-2Rkh variant of their ubiquitous BRDM recce vehicle. CBRN variants of the BRDM still serve in many parts of the world. The US Army used Jeeps and M113 APCs, generally without much specialty equipment installed in them, until the very end of the Cold War. As late as 1993, training slides at US Army Chemical School showed soldiers leaning off the back ramp of an M113 with detector paper on a wooden stick as an actual technique.