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| Big fan: Marine 1st Sgt. Eric Rummel stands near a Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected (MRAP) truck in which he survived a blast
from a roadside bomb in Afghanistan in 2008. Courtesy of Eric Rummel |
MRAP trucks: Afghan savior or boondoggle?
The vehicle saved soldiers in Iraq. Now it's getting a $2 billion makeover for Afghanistan.
By Gordon Lubold | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the June 25, 2009 edition
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Washington - It took a matter of seconds to make 1st Sgt. Eric Rummel a true believer.
The marine was driving through southern Afghanistan last year when his truck hit a roadside bomb buried in a gulch. The vehicle shuddered, popped into the air, and settled back down again in a cloud of desert dust.
The whole thing was over before he knew what happened, but Sergeant Rummel and the two other men in the truck that day all walked away. The truck was a Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected truck (MRAP) – a 16-ton behemoth that came to be regarded as the soldier's lifeboat in Iraq, its V-shaped hull saving lives by deflecting the blast of roadside bombs.
Rummel's story points to the same success in Afghanistan. "God bless the MRAP and what it does," he says.
But the mammoth trucks are built for Iraq, where troops are fighting a largely urban insurgency on city streets. Afghanistan's insurgency is rural, and the Pentagon is in a race to completely redesign the MRAP for its new duty, making it lighter, with a beefier suspension and better off-road capabilities for troops who launch missions into fields and up hillsides – often with no roads.
The effort, however, calls into question one of the bedrock tenets of Defense Secretary Robert Gates's regime: He wants to prioritize equipment that saves troops' lives. But experts wonder if, in the process, he is saddling the military for years to come with a fleet of vehicles that can be used in only one spot on the globe.
"It's not so clear that we can develop a new class of vehicles every time we go to a new country," says Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the Lexington Institute, a policy group in Washington.
The initial program to come up with a new breed of Afghan-friendly MRAPs, called Multi-Purpose All Terrain Vehicles, or M-ATVs, will cost $2 billion. The MRAP program has produced more than 16,000 vehicles in two years. This month, the Pentagon is expected to finalize a contract that would put more than 2,000 M-ATVs in Afghanistan – some by this fall.
The logic is clear: Roadside bomb attacks in Afghanistan are up some 80 percent over last year.
The day Rummel's truck was hit, he was using his MRAP as an ambulance to evacuate war wounded near the town of Now Zad in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan, an area of intense fighting. Before his truck had even arrived in the gulch, four other improvised explosive devices had detonated in that area; two marines later needed amputations.
The explosion surprised Rummel, particularly because the Humvee in front of him had just driven through the same gulch unscathed.
As much as he loves the truck that protected his life, Rummel says the current MRAP isn't the right truck for Afghanistan, adding: "It's just too big of a vehicle."
Pentagon planners agree. They "are convinced that the terrain and infrastructure in Afghanistan vary so greatly from Iraq that a different class of heavy trucks is required," says Mr. Thompson of the Lexington Institute.
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