Saturday, January 14, 2006

Humvee armor an issue. Again

The media might be restarting its obsession with Humvee armor again. The AP has a story about soldiers who are innovating ways to keep their Humvees safe from IEDs. I applaud American soldiers for being some of the most innovative and creative soldiers the world has ever seen in the field. Unfortunately, the one thing the media never seems to understand is that no vehicle, be it a Jeep, a Humvee, a tank, a plane, or a ship of war, is ever completely safe for a soldier. You can armor a Humvee to the point that it will only go 15 miles an hour and get about 1000 feet to the gallon, but if hit with enough explosives, I assure you it and anyone in it will be destroyed.

The Humvee is a great military vehicle, but it may not be the best vehicle for the type of warfare we are fighting in Iraq. New vehicles cannot be designed, tested, and mass produced overnight, though, and soldiers and the military have done an admirable job of adjusting to the enemy and modifying the Humvee to offer added protection to its inhabitants. New vehicles, such as The Rock, are being designed to address the problems facing vehicles like the Humvee. As long as there is war, though, our enemies will find a way to circumvent the protections of an armored vehicle. Being a soldier in theater is a dangerous job, and the risks to life and limb can never be fully negated. The best you can ask of the soldiers and the military is to adjust to threats in order to better protect soldiers. That is being done. You cannot expect the military to find a way to place an impenetrable bubble around soldiers because those would be expectations that can never be met.

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