WASHINGTON The military is rushing armored vehicles with specially designed hulls to Iraq and Afghanistan to limit the damage from roadside bombs, the No. 1 killer of U.S. troops.
The bombs, which the military calls improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have killed or wounded thousands of troops and shredded conventional military vehicles. The new vehicles have a V-shaped hull, which disperses the force of an explosion and helps keep the vehicle from flipping over.
"It's just going to be the standard for any vehicle on the battlefield over the next 10 years," John Pike, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va., said of the V-shaped hull.
Not only are lives at stake, but also millions and potentially billions of dollars.
The Pentagon's Joint IED Defeat Organization is spending nearly $3.5 billion this year to combat IEDs. Pentagon records show that since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, 1,074 troops have been killed and 11,513 others wounded by insurgent bombs.
A major Pentagon supplier of V-shaped vehicles is 9-year-old Force Protection of Ladson, S.C. The Pentagon says the number of the company's Buffalo and Cougar V-shaped vehicles in Iraq is classified, but public records show the military has bought almost 300. That compares with more than 35,000 Humvees, the military's main multipurpose vehicle, in Iraq. The Buffalo vehicles cost $750,000 apiece, about five times the cost of an armored Humvee, which is smaller.
Force Protection says nobody inside a Buffalo has been killed in Iraq or Afghanistan despite encountering thousands of IED blasts.
Retired general Montgomery Meigs, head of the anti-IED organization, said the Buffalo's armor and shape make it "a lot more robust than the Humvee."
Foreign companies, many of them in South Africa, have been the leaders in developing the vehicles. Some of the Pentagon's largest contractors are marketing V-shaped vehicles with foreign partners. They include:
AM General, the maker of the Humvee, is pitching to the Pentagon a V-shaped armored car called the Cobra. It is made by Otokar, a Turkish company, and uses a Humvee drivetrain.
Oshkosh Truck, which makes many of the military's trucks, has partnered with ADI of Australia to market the Bushmaster armored vehicle.
Blackwater, a private security firm that protects U.S. diplomats in Iraq, developed is own vehicle, the Grizzly, which it will send to Iraq soon.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican and a member of the Armed Services Committee, pushed the Pentagon to buy the Buffalo and Cougar.
Graham said the Pentagon has acted quickly to deploy the vehicles, without the kind of delays seen in sending body armor and armored Humvees to Iraq.
"This is an example of where (the Pentagon) has gotten it right," Graham said. "They're doing it as fast as they can."
