The Humvee, the modern successor to the Jeep, has a thin sheet-metal skin that won’t stop even small-caliber handgun rounds. “On the eve of the war in Iraq, just 2% of the Army’s world-wide fleet of 110,000 Humvees were armored,” according to Cold-War Thinking Prevented Vital Vehicle From Reaching Iraq:
When the Humvee was first developed in the 1980s as an all-purpose transport vehicle, armoring it made little sense. Back then, the Army was preparing to fight the Soviets on a battlefield where heavily armored tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles were out front, providing a line of defense for Humvees and supply trucks in the rear.In 1992, O’Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt Armoring Co., a small Fairfield, Ohio, company that made armored cars and wanted to break into the military market, built the first armored Humvee on spec to show the Army what it could do. “We could see how warfare was changing in places like Panama and Colombia,” says Robert Mecredy, president of the aerospace and defense division of Armor Holdings Inc., O’Gara-Hess’s parent.
A few months later, soldiers cruising the streets of Somalia in a thin-skinned Humvee ran over a land mine. Four Americans died, and the Army issued an urgent call to field 10 of the early armored Humvees. The vehicles were being offloaded in Mogadishu when Army Rangers got into a nightlong firefight that killed 18 Americans — many of them fighting from thin-skinned Humvees.
Days later the Army withdrew, leaving a small contingent of Marines. When the Army tried to take the armored Humvees back to the U.S., the Marines protested. “I got a frantic call from a captain telling me the Marines weren’t going to let the Army take their [armored] Humvees home,” recalls retired Lt. Col. J.C. Hudson, who accompanied the armored vehicles to Mogadishu. Col. Hudson says he told the young captain to let the Marines keep the vehicles.
In the wake of the Somalia debacle, Army officials in charge of the Humvee program were eager to find a niche for the armored version, which at $180,000 costs more than twice as much as the regular vehicle. The program’s most enthusiastic backers were military police, who specialize in riot control, peacekeeping and stabilizing an area following combat.
But officials involved in the program worried that the Army might not embrace a peacekeeping vehicle. They were also concerned the relatively small military-police force, which boasts no three- or four-star generals, lacked “the horsepower to get the armored Humvee built,” says John Weaver, an Army program manager who oversaw the service’s Humvee fleet. So Mr. Weaver and his colleagues instead pitched the armored Humvee as a scout vehicle that would venture out in front of the tanks during big battles and beam back information about the enemy.
The armored Humvee proved terrible at that job. Early test vehicles were too heavy, and whenever they ventured off road in soft soil they got stuck in the mud. Senior officers in the Army’s armor school, which trains and equips the service’s heavy-tank force, wanted to kill the armored-Humvee program entirely.