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Why so few bomb-safe US military trucks in Iraq?
No one has ever been killed riding in the 31,000-pound 'Cougar.' But only a few hundred are in service.
from the May 31, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
But the enemy was adapting, placing roadside bombs in such a way to cause blasts that ripped through the underside of vehicles, causing casualties.
At the same time, a small company in South Carolina called Force Protection Inc. was pushing a different solution. It had designed a truck with a steel undercarriage shaped like a 'V,' which diverted the force of blasts to the side of the vehicle.
But the company and those who supported the initiative couldn't provide enough data to prove the effectiveness of the MRAP design. And even if it had had the data to make the case to the Pentagon, the company was too small to mass-produce the vehicle. A year earlier, its 11-employee workforce had taken a month to produce just one truck.
"In the beginning, we really weren't good enough to mass produce enough to be a good, mainstream solution," says Mike Aldrich, the company's vice-president of marketing and government relations.
But Marines with the I Marine Expeditionary Force in Camp Pendleton, Calif., knew the design would save lives and made a request in February 2005 for more than 1,100 of the trucks. More than a year later, they made a second request. The Pentagon ultimately approved just 185 vehicles in mid-2006. Even as the Pentagon gears up to buy thousands more of the vehicles, Biden wants Secretary Gates to investigate the delay.
The Pentagon wants 21,000 of the vehicles and Congress is paying for 7,700 of them. The company is now producing each month
about 100 Cougars – the version most wanted by the military – and it's preparing to go to a 200-per-month production rate,
hiring 25 new employees a week. Aldrich says his company can make 10,000 vehicles by December 2008 – but that's if he gets
an order from the US government by July 1. [Editor's note: The original version misstated the date for Force Protection’s production goal.]
"That will get a lot of people protected in a hurry," he says. "Now we're clearly putting the ball back in the government's court, we're saying 'place the order,' " he says.
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