Snow and Ice Control (SNIC) Equipment
and Its Use by Military Units Worldwide
NICHOLAS H. COLLINS
1
INTRODUCTION
Upon learning that the U.S. Army required up-to-date snowplowing equip-
ment to meet obvious demands after initiating operations into Bosnia in Decem-
ber 1995, the Commanding General, U.S. Army-Europe (USAREUR) asked the
Chief of Engineers to provide expedited assistance to help resolve an urgent
problem. The problem was given to the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and
Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asset, for
immediate action.
The Small Emplacement Excavator (SEE) tractor had been through RDT&E
and fielding began in 3Q 1988. Shortly thereafter various additional attachments
were in development to be substituted for the front loader bucket and the rear-
mounted backhoe. One of these was a snowplow to be mounted in place of the
front loader. This work was ongoing in the late 1980s at the U.S. Army Belvoir
Research, Development, and Engineering Center. After a prototype was
developed, funding and command interest disappeared and the product was
dropped. The prototype was lost but the paperwork was found, and a new plow
was ordered from the original manufacturer, Schmidt Engineering and Equip-
ment, Inc. Schmidt built the new plow from their drawings and delivered it to
CRREL in six days.
The plow was put through severe tests and demonstrations both on and off
road, on unpaved and paved roads, and on steep gradients. The plow passed all
these tests and was declared fully operational. Seventeen SEE tractor snowplows
were subsequently shipped to Bosnia.
The High Mobility Multi-purpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) snowplow
was patterned after a similar plow that was developed for the commercial
Hummer and first fielded to troops in Operation Able Sentry in Macedonia and
to the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry) at Fort Drum, New York. This
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