When armored humvees failed to shield troops in Iraq, the military services quickly began acquiring hundreds of MRAPs, or mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles.
But despite assertions that the MRAP will eventually replace all humvees in military missions, a more accurate prediction is that humvees will vastly outnumber MRAPs for the foreseeable future, at least if the Army has any say in it.
“The humvee is not going anywhere. It will be with us until 2026, possibly until 2030,” said Col. Jeffrey Helmick, transportation capabilities manager at the Army Training and Doctrine Command.
While the Army will be adding more MRAPs to its array of combat vehicles in Iraq — primarily to augment its armored troop carriers in convoy security duties — it will continue to rely on armored humvees as the primary tactical truck, Helmick told an industry conference in Alexandria, Va., hosted by the Institute for Defense and Government Advancement.
Outside Iraq, and especially in homeland defense operations, the hulking MRAP vehicles — designed with V-shaped hulls to repel improvised explosive devices — will have limited utility, he noted. “You’ll never see an MRAP in downtown New Orleans. You’ll see a humvee.”
Helmick, who commanded an Army battalion during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, recently returned there and noticed that despite a growing number of MRAP vehicles, units continue to install armor on humvees. “Soldiers in the motor pool are making a difference when it comes to up armoring,” Helmick said.
The Marine Corps announced earlier this year that it would begin substituting all armored humvees with MRAPs. The Army will not take humvees out of service, but will integrate MRAP vehicles into the fleet as they become available. “The Army is not replacing M1151-A1 [humvees] one-for-one with MRAPs,” Helmick said. “We are taking some off the road and replacing them with [M1117] armored security vehicles for convoy security.”
Helmick estimated that Army units in Iraq currently have about 1,100 MRAPs, although that number continually increases as more vehicles arrive from the United States. By comparison, there are more than 21,000 humvees there.
Most of the humvees are being equipped with an add-on armor package known as “Frag Kit 5.”
A small number of trucks have been outfitted with the heavier and larger “Frag Kit 6.” But this variant has not been well received by troops because it adds too much width to the vehicle. Soldiers have complained that the vehicle is too wide to get through the gates of some of the compounds.
The progression in the armoring of the humvee — from “hillbilly armor” to several iterations of various armor kits and upgraded factory-armored models — is rather astonishing, considering that when U.S. troops first crossed the border into Iraq they were trying to “strip down” their vehicles to make them faster, Helmick recalled. “I had never heard of an IED [improvised explosive device] until July 2003 in Fallujah.”
The Army and the Marine Corps plan to acquire a “joint light tactical vehicle” to replace the humvee, but even if the JLTV materializes sometime in the next decade, there will still be humvees around. There are 132,000 humvees in the fleet today. The JLTV program projects buying 36,000 vehicles. “If you do the math, you see that we’ll always have the AM General humvee with us,” Helmick said.
As part of a “humvee improvement program,” the Army Tank Automotive and Armaments Command will reassemble three humvees with V-shaped hulls. Then Army testers at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., will assess their survivability.
The biggest drawback in the humvee is that the armor hinders payload and performance, he said. The Army would like to find a way to build humvees with lighter armor, and to only add heavier protection kits when needed. The aim is not to attach the steel plates permanently, as it’s currently done.
“We expect to have another plan for the humvees when they come back from theater,” Helmick said.
It remains unclear, however, what the Army will do with the MRAP after it leaves Iraq. Both the Army and the Marine Corps said they would buy between 7,700 to 22,000 vehicles during the next two years.
MRAPs are likely to remain niche vehicles for explosive ordnance disposal units, rather than mainstream equipment in future Army combat units, military and industry sources said.
From a logistics standpoint, they are impractical. “These things are very heavy. Only a few ships are able to transport them,” Helmick said. Once they arrive by ship in Kuwait, they get loaded on a “heavy equipment transport,” or HET vehicle, which the Army typically uses to move heavy tanks.
The Defense Department has made MRAP its top acquisition priority. To expedite the production of vehicles, the Marine Corps Systems Command requires that all selected contractors build the vehicles according to standard design specifications and using common components. As the number of U.S. military casualties has steadily climbed as a result of bigger and more powerful roadside bombs, members of Congress have been pressuring the Defense Department to buy more MRAP vehicles, even if they don’t comply with the standard design. So far, five companies have received MRAP production contracts.
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