I recall when the Humvee was introduced and trumpeted as the Jeep
replacement. Think of what the Jeep was, and you wouldn't be as surprised as
the
Army brass was when our guys were being killed by plain old gunfire and the
vehicle was destroyed by mines, RPGs and roadside bombs. Then they decided
to put a gun on the roof and have the guy that handles that weapon be
completely out in the open and exposed.
Much later on, after all these losses did they come up with the armored
Humvee and some other mine resistant armored vehicle with a vee bottom.
In the government's defense, urban warfare is a relatively new concept and
it takes probably 10-15 years to propose, design, get funded from congress
and build a new vehicle. So, many got caught off guard by urban warfare
being the new norm. Heck, it was only 15 years prior to the first Gulf War
that we were still doing it the old fashioned way in Vietnam, area bombing
with B-52s. But you'd think that someone in all those think-tanks we employ
could have seen it coming.
Today, if you fight a war like we did in WWII, you'd be prosecuted as a war
criminal for all the civilian deaths you caused. The flip side to that is,
if we fought WWII like we fight wars now, we'd still be fighting WWII.
George
On 31 Dec 2012, at 20:37, Chris Crawford <chris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> The answer is that the Iraq war was largely an urban war, and tracked
APCs
> can damage paved roads in cities. Remember, we were supposed to be
> 'liberating' Iraq, not destroying its cities (though we did a lot of
> that). I wonder why the Army didn't have an armored version of the Humvee
> or some other APC more suited to urban warfare?
--
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