Must-Haves for the Next Humvee
By DANNY HAKIM
Published: January 30, 2005
The Humvee is not cutting it.
Designed for a different era and a different kind of war, the military's beleaguered flagship truck is starting to look like the Edsel of Iraq.
Much of the problem was lack of foresight. The Humvee comes in an armored version, but military leaders initially saw little need for it, and the Bush administration did not bet on a prolonged insurgency in Iraq. Now that roadside bombs have become a weapon of choice, every Humvee rolling off the line at AM General, the Indiana-based maker, is the more rugged kind.
"The way we thought we would use trucks five or six years ago is different than the way we are using them today," said Lt. Gen. Claude V. Christianson, the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics, in an interview earlier this month at the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona.
"We had planned and organized our forces so that we would have an area that we owned, and we'd have boundaries, and we'd have a front line, and we'd have a rear area," he said. "The trucks that we use to deliver supplies would be driving along roads that were relatively secure. Today's battlefield is not like that." ...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/weekinreview/30bigp.html>
Carl