Call for vehicle armor dates back years, but delays stalled production

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/nation/11392131.htm

<snip>

As with humvees, Army planners had talked for years about the need to armor trucks. In 2000, Maj. Gen. William E. Mortensen termed them "the most vulnerable" part of the military's fleet.

As early as 2002, in the run-up to the Iraq war, a design for armoring the cabs of widely used five-ton trucks was drawn up, and some Pentagon officials pushed to get it funded and built. But until this year, that was where the design stayed: on the drawing board.

Late last week, Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson acknowledged that the current kit for armoring the truck cabs, although somewhat changed, is "something close" to what was designed in 2002.

At the dawn of the Iraqi insurgency, in May 2003, civilian workers relayed word home to Stewart & Stevenson, a Texas maker of Army truck cabs: Send armor.

By that summer, the firm was, with Army cooperation, designing a fully armored cab, as opposed to an add-on kit, for medium trucks. But delays kept many of these trucks from rolling off lines for nearly 18 months.

[blue neen]

1. What was it that the idiot Rumsfeld said?

"You go to war with what you've got?"

What a cold-hearted bastard.