I par­tic­i­pated in a round­table inter­view last week with Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the deputy com­man­der of I Marine Expeditionary Force and the on-​​the-​​ground com­man­der (until last month) of oper­a­tions in Anbar province.

It was a wide rang­ing dis­cus­sion, but what I’d like to share with every­one here is some­thing that bol­sters my orig­i­nal argu­ment about coun­ter­ing IEDs and looks toward the future of how we’re going to get our arms around the threat of road­side bombs in Afghanistan.

Kelly said try­ing to counter IEDs with high tech­nol­ogy proved to be a never end­ing cycle of counter and counter-​​counter. First it was com­mand det­o­na­tion by wire; then it evolved into radio det­o­na­tion with prim­i­tive sig­nals such as garage door open­ers, then it went to cell and tele­phone det­o­na­tion, then pres­sure plates, IR beams and on and on.

But in the end, what cleared the roads and wrapped up the net­works were boots on the ground.

“It became an infantry, on the side of the road, going through the bushes kind of fight. The kind of fight that America has tended to stay away from because we have all of the tech­nol­ogy. … And every­thing they did that we tried to defeat … they would just come up with a solu­tion to that.“ 

Kelly went on to applaud the AM General M1114 Humvee, adding that the MRAP, while effec­tive, is vir­tu­ally use­less off road — a vir­tual No Go for remote Anbar and Afghanistan.

“The 1114s are very effec­tive, par­tic­u­larly from side blasts — they’re remark­ably effec­tive for side blasts. They’re weaker under­neath, we all know that. So the next thing was the MRAP. The trade off with the MRAP is that it’s the best in the world at tak­ing an under-​​carriage attack but it’s also a nearly use­less vehi­cle unless you’re on a hard-​​surface road. Off road — even on a dirt road — you can move them maybe one or two miles per hour. Cross coun­try they have zero abil­ity. Are the troops pro­tected inside, they are, and under … all cir­cum­stances that’s impor­tant — but if you’re going to sur­ren­der tac­ti­cal mobil­ity sim­ply to keep peo­ple from get­ting hurt, there’s a trade-​​off.“

Kelly went on to say the Corps resisted the knee-​​jerk impulse to replace all Humvees in the­ater with MRAPs, since the M1114 is “actu­ally quite good off road” and “quite good from an armor point of view,” instead replac­ing about half the Humvees with MRAPs.

What ulti­mately defeated the IED threat and saved lives? Killing the IED net­work with intelligence-​​based, tar­geted oper­a­tions and sur­veil­lance. It’s like I started to say after my month in Ramadi in 2005: the best IED armor is a sniper team.

Kelly’s thoughts on defeat­ing IEDs and armor­ing against them are even more rel­e­vant to the Afghan debate. Let’s not fool our­selves — the same gang that wanted to pull out of Iraq dur­ing the tough­est time there are now in charge of the Afghan fight. We can debate the larger issues in this later, but what do you think will hap­pen when more pic­tures and videos of twisted Humvee hulks and four dead Soldiers and Marines are streamed in even greater num­bers than they are now back in the U.S.? The up-​​armoring cabal will be back on the pul­pit, insist­ing that every­one ride in tanks or MRAPs. And pre­dictably, many DT read­ers will yell at me when I point out how stu­pid that idea would be.

And, oh yeah, how many miles of hard-​​surface road are there in Afghanistan? Armored Humvees have a hard enough time weav­ing their way safely through the Wadis and rick­ety bridges. How do you think even the light­est MRAP would fare?

Well, at least Kelly and I agree — and some oth­ers (Dakota Wood) — that pro­tec­tion from IEDs doesn’t come from hun­ker­ing down inside a bank vault on wheels, it’s about mobil­ity, intel­li­gence and eye­balls. Thank good­ness the Corps (and some Army units) pushed back on the MRAP hys­te­ria, end­ing up on the right side of the argu­ment after all.

– Christian

We ran another MRAP story this morn­ing at Military​.com that Greg Grant over at DoD Buzz pre­viewed a few weeks ago.

The mil­i­tary is press­ing its case for MRAP-​​like vehi­cles that are able to endure the rig­ors of the kind of ter­rain found in Afghanistan. This is a smart move on the part of the Pentagon, which is admit­ting that the cur­rent MRAP is a bank vault on wheels and not suited to aus­tere envi­ron­ments where paved roads and struc­turally sound bridges are not the norm.

The inter­est­ing thing about the story though — and some­thing I’d like your thoughts on — is the con­ver­gence of the JLTV pro­gram, the result­ing protest delay and this new urgent need. To what extend is the NorGrum/​Boeing/​Oshkosh/​Textron protest delay­ing or inhibit­ing the options for ful­fill­ing this MRAP-​​ATV request? Seems to me if the play­ers weren’t hung up in protest fights over the JLTV demon­stra­tion phase, some of them could offer vari­a­tions of their JLTV ideas in the near term to the Army — but may instead defer any work on it for fear of dis­rupt­ing their posi­tion in the protest deliberations.

That may be way off, but I’m curi­ous on how that might play into it. Many argue that the tanker protests have dis­rupted America’s abil­ity to wage aer­ial com­bat and oper­a­tions world­wide. I think that’s a stretch. But in this case, we KNOW that lives are being lost and that some­thing new needs to be fielded fast or more will die.

One of the poten­tial prob­lems the Army has not ade­quately addressed is that none of the MRAP vehi­cles are front-​​line vehi­cles, in the sense that they can­not oper­ate in an envi­ron­ment approach­ing mid– to high-​​intensity com­bat. They can and do prove use­ful in sta­bil­ity and coun­terin­sur­gency oper­a­tions, par­tic­u­larly in urban areas that require troops to con­duct lots of pres­ence patrols.

But in an envi­ron­ment where an enemy is equipped with large num­bers of man-​​portable anti-​​tank weapons, of even the omnipresent low-​​tech RPG-​​7 vari­ety, these vehi­cles are not sur­viv­able. They dont have the armor pro­tec­tion and are very big tar­gets. While it makes sense in wartime to build vehi­cles tai­lored for spe­cific com­bat envi­ron­ments, one has to won­der if the ser­vice has any kind of long term strat­egy for all these new heav­ily armored trucks it keeps buying. 

This brings up another good point. MRAPs are good against IEDs but not so good against RPGs (I know why and where the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties are, but won’t dis­cuss them here). So this new ATV will have to have some of the same armor inno­va­tions man­u­fac­tur­ers have planned for the JLTV in order to meet the requirement.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this devel­ops and we’ll bring you the lat­est as we get info.

– Christian

We ran a story this morn­ing on Military​.com about the Pentagon Inspector General report on the response by the Marine Corps to Urgent Universal Needs requests for MRAP-​​style vehi­cles. The IG posted a brief sum­mary of its find­ings on the DoD web site, so take a look and assess if for yourself.

It seems to me the IG ruled on a very nar­row set of fac­tors, namely how did the Corps respond to an UNS of this nature — when hun­dreds of UNSs were com­ing in and other com­man­ders deemed M1114 Humvees a bet­ter match for the threat vs mobil­ity equa­tion. The whole UNS process was new and com­man­ders were con­stantly look­ing over there shoul­der to see how much heat they’d get on their pri­or­i­ti­za­tion of these requests. What was more impor­tant, scope cov­ers or thigh holsters?

Here’s what the IG said:

We rec­om­mend that the Director, Joint Staff estab­lish pro­ce­dures in Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction 3470.01, Rapid Validation and Resourcing of Joint Urgent Operational Needs (JUONs) in the Year of Execution, July 15, 2005, and that the Commanding General, MCCDC estab­lish pro­ce­dures in Marine Corps Order 3900.17, The Marine Corps Urgent Needs Process (UNP) and the Urgent Universal Need Statement (Urgent UNS), October 17, 2008, to enable Service require­ments devel­op­ers to for­ward urgent require­ments that may have joint-​​Service applic­a­bil­ity directly to the appro­pri­ate com­bat­ant com­man­der for endorse­ment and sub­se­quent sub­mis­sion to the Joint Staff for val­i­da­tion as a Joint Urgent Operational Need. 

But I thought this line was most significant:

DoD was aware of the threat posed by mines and impro­vised explo­sive devices (IEDs) in low-​​intensity con­flicts and of the avail­abil­ity of mine-​​resistant vehi­cles years before insur­gent actions began in Iraq in 2003. Yet DoD did not develop require­ments for, fund, or acquire MRAP-​​type vehi­cles for low-​​intensity con­flicts that involved mines and IEDs. As a result, the Department entered into oper­a­tions in Iraq with­out hav­ing taken avail­able steps to acquire tech­nol­ogy to mit­i­gate the known mine and IED risk to sol­diers and Marines. We are mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions only to the Marine Corps because the scope of our audit was lim­ited to a review of Marine Corps actions to address the IED threat. We plan to address other Services actions to counter the IED threat dur­ing future audits. 

So, the IG is say­ing the Pentagon knew about the threat and did noth­ing about it? I can see this on one level but then I was there in sum­mer of ’03 and IEDs just weren’t a threat at the time…No one was talk­ing about them and most of the time we were rolling around Baghdad in soft vehi­cles with­out ever even think­ing about mines or IEDs.
DoD IG MRAP brf

– Christian

This was passed along to me from a source on the EFP retro-​​armoring for MRAPs cur­rently in Iraq. Looks as if we have some fidelity on the num­bers (and this is also posted in the com­ments sec­tion of the pre­vi­ous post, but for the ben­e­fit of those that don’t read­ily dive into pots of boil­ing oil, I cross-​​post it here).

From MSNBC:

Meanwhile, at Camp Arifjahn in Kuwait, the mil­i­tary is rein­forc­ing some of the blast-​​resistant vehi­cles with addi­tional side armor and it shipped as many as 20 of the newly upgraded vehi­cles to the bat­tle­front in April. An addi­tional 30 are to go into Iraq begin­ning this month.

The addi­tional armor is shipped in kits to Kuwait and installed on the MRAPs, which only recently arrived at a facil­ity ded­i­cated to out­fit­ting the vehi­cles with anten­nas and equip­ment before being sent to troops.

An extra 5,000 pounds added to a vehi­cle that already weighs in at 19 tons in some cases? Ouch.

An our source tells me…

EFP pro­tec­tion is included as stan­dard equip­ment on all improved MRAP I vehi­cles built as a result of the MRAP awards announced 18 Dec 2007.

The Army and USMC are both get­ting deliv­er­ies of improved MRAP I vehi­cles between May 2008 and Dec 2008 per the con­tracts I men­tioned. The same applies to EFP pro­tec­tion upgrades for fielded MRAP vehicles.

Now we’re all spooled up. Thanks to read­ers and other sources for the gouge.

– Christian

A source with inside knowl­edge of the issue sent me this today and I thought I’d share it with you:

Armor kits to deal with the EFP threat to MRAPs is already in pro­duc­tion and some kits are in the shipment/​installation pipeline to units in Iraq.

The prob­lem with high tempo mil­i­tary oper­a­tions is that those on the cut­ting edge will not turn in their cur­rent equip­ment for upgrade when the alter­na­tive is using armored Humvees while the exist­ing MRAP vehi­cles are being upgraded.

Now, we’re still work­ing on find­ing out what this armor could be — or do — and how many are being shipped. But this is truly an impor­tant, and intrigu­ing, development.

– Christian

I’d heard about this but it only recently popped up on the wires…

New Concerns After 2 Die in MRAP

The deaths of two U.S. Soldiers in west­ern Baghdad last week have sparked con­cerns that Iraqi insur­gents have devel­oped a new weapon capa­ble of strik­ing what the U.S. mil­i­tary con­sid­ers its most explosive-​​resistant vehicle.

The Soldiers were rid­ing in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protective vehi­cle, known as an MRAP, when an explo­sion sent a blast of super-​​heated metal through the MRAP’s armor and into the vehi­cle, killing them both.

Their deaths brought to eight the num­ber of American troops killed while rid­ing in an MRAP, which was devel­oped and deployed to Iraq last year after years of acri­mony over light armor on the Army’s work­horse vehi­cle, the Humvee.

The mil­i­tary has praised the vehi­cles for sav­ing hun­dreds of lives, say­ing they could with­stand the IEDs, or impro­vised explo­sive devices, which have been the biggest killers of Americans in Iraq. The Pentagon has set aside $5.4 bil­lion to acquire 4,000 MRAPs at more than $1 mil­lion each, mak­ing the MRAP the Defense Department’s third largest acqui­si­tion pro­gram, behind mis­sile defense and the Joint Strike Fighter.

But last Wednesday’s attack has shown that the MRAPs are vul­ner­a­ble to an espe­cially potent form of IED known as an EFP, for explo­sively formed pen­e­tra­tor, which fires a super­heated cone of metal through the vehicle’s armor.

Military offi­cials are still try­ing to deter­mine whether last week’s attack is a sign of “new vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties (in the vehi­cle) or new (weapons) capa­bil­i­ties” on the part of insur­gents, said Navy Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for Adm. Michael Mullen, chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

And I know one other weapon that will slice through an MRAP “like a hot knife through but­ter” accord­ing to a Navy EOD tech I rode with in a JERV in Iraq, but I won’t say it here (any­one who knows MRAPs well enough will know what I’m talk­ing about).

I guess it didn’t take long for the IED arms race to catch up with the MRAP.

– Christian