this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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I'm pretty sure there is. Families since the aughts have been buying or making cardboard inserts for standard issue to help ensure Johnny comes marching home, once it had been determined the armor issued wasn't doing it when dealing with IEDs.
But whether good armor doesn't exist doesn't matter. What matters is standard issue is resulting in troops coming home permanently missing faculties for which the DVA isn't adequately managing. So we counter-recruiters are telling them there are worse things that can happen than you coming back in a box, like you coming back in parts and your family confined to poverty and wiping your ass for the rest of your natural life.
Cardboard does absolutely nothing. And there was a small period of time in 2003 or 4 where there wasn't enough uparmored trucks. But that's it.
As far as the government not giving help to the TBI guys, yeah that tracks.
There were armor upgrades explicitly downvoted by congress. Then we were losing humvees to IEDs like flies to glow traps. Mechanics were attaching scrap until rhino kits came out. Not a good look.
The war on false pretenses also soured the whole ordeal. I hear our grade-schoolers coming back from American History are being taught Iraqi Freedom was revenge for the 9/11 attacks. (It wasn't.)
Oh no. Those things were horrible. The 1/2 inch steel plate was better. And yeah I remember driving around in those things. The steel plate is why I still have legs. Eventually though the anti coalition forces just started using something called an Explosively Formed Projectile (EFP). At which point we might as well have driven dune buggies for all the good armor would do. And by eventually, I mean late 2004.
Then there were the mission restrictions for heavily armored Humvees and early MRAPs. Basically they had to stay on asphalt and couldn't handle much in the way of curb hopping or going under bridges. We actually spent most of our second deployment in an old 1025 Humvee (the 1990's armor that wasn't seen as good enough) and had a much higher mission rate because we could go places other units could not.
I understand that from the outside the answer always looks like more armor, but it really isn't. And we made a lot of vehicles that could come through a normal blast just fine, but with a dead crew from over pressure. It wasn't until the M-ATV that we solved that problem. And that thing got made available as fast as possible. It now lives on in the JLTV.
Tl;Dr - Factory uparmored vehicles were a boondoggle sold to reassure civilians. They were less mission capable and did not prevent casualties.
Edit to add - That 9/11 Iraq myth pisses me off so much. I don't know why we went, but it wasn't for 9/11.
Thank you! A lot of this is new information to me!
No problem. It's a pretty niche experience bit so I try to spread it where I can.