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MRAP's are tough.

By The Armorer on February 6, 2008 | | Comments (8)

This Caiman MRAP protected 11 soldiers from a road side bomb in Iraq.

This Caiman MRAP protected 11 soldiers from a road side bomb in Iraq.

The vehicle shows several hits by fragments including ones that 1) removed the passenger side door handle, 2) put a large hole through the air filter and 3) removed the fuel tank, which should be visible between the legs of the soldiers under the door. It looks like the window in the door took a beating but held it's place, too.

Of course, you put enough explosive into your bomb, you can kill anything, so they aren't going to be perfect. But they're a heckuva lot safer than an armored HMMWV!

H/t, Strategy Page.

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8 Comments

 
By John of Argghhh! on February 7, 2008 9:55 AM
True enough.
MRAP vehicles have v-shaped hulls that deflect blasts from underneath, but they have proved to be too big and unwieldy to go off-road or cross many bridges. The Corps originally requested 3,700 of the vehicles, but it later scaled back its request to 2,300 vehicles due to their intrinsic limitations and the improved security in western Iraq.
So, they aren't as versatile as we'd like (they were developed as a stop-gap to meet a need) and, gee, the "improved security situation" makes them believe they don't need as many of the vehicles as they once thought they would. Context, #4, context! Kinda like North American Arms only made 100 M1911 pistols in 1918 when the war ended and the contract was cancelled... because no more were needed. That was very MSM-like of you!
 
By Cannoneer No. 4 on February 7, 2008 10:37 AM
Ouch! Harsh, John. Harsh. I remember back in 2004 when John Kerry made a huge issue out of the shortage of uparmored humvees. I was insensitive enough to proclaim that the only soldiers who had a right to an armored vehicle were 19D's. We have MRAPs because Force Protection and casualty avoidance trumps all other considerations. Now the MRAP's limitations can no longer be ignored, but will the politicians who rammed them down our throats pay any price?
 
By Cannoneer No. 4 on February 7, 2008 10:47 AM
19K's too. Got CAV on the brain today. Remember 11E's?
 
By John of Argghhh! on February 7, 2008 11:00 AM
Well, I was maybe a little mean. And of course they won't pay a price. Hell, almost no one pays a price for those kinds of decisions. Except Private Snuffy and Sergeant Schultz and Lieutenant Cosglotz. We have MRAPs because we were fighting an asymetrical war with a force designed, trained and equipped for lineal warfare, with defineable safe areas that HMMWVs would have mostly been okay in. And we had to flex and adapt, and quickly, far more quickly than the system is really designed to (a design the result of how government works).
 
By Cannoneer No. 4 on February 7, 2008 11:51 AM
We have MRAP's for the same reason we run armored buses on Route Irish. We were commuting to the war from FOB's, and IED's were the enemy's most effective weapon. We chose defense over attacking the networks and controlling the battle space. Having failed to strategically communicate why the whole of the Middle East is worth the bones of a single Mississippi paratrooper, the American people demanded nothing but the best protection for our boys, and now we are getting ship loads of improved Alabama Slammers to hand over to our Iraqi allies when we leave.
 
By John of Argghhh! on February 7, 2008 1:03 PM
11E - Armor crewman.
 
By John of Argghhh! on February 7, 2008 1:32 PM
Heh. Well, there were people who wanted to get the M113's back in the fight, weren't there...
 
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