Much has been made lately of the need for "up-armored" Humvees, but I have to say that this is just not the answer. A Humvee is not designed to be a combat car, it is designed to be a SUV for military purposes. Adding a ton of armor to it puts severe strain on damn near everything. Add to that the troops with our body armor, heavy weapons, radios, etc... Humvees thus equipped need a lot of maintenance, same with trucks that are similarly modified. This is no secret.
The Army has a severe problem with accepting armored cars. Everythign is either a tracked behemoth or a light-skinned car, we have nothing in the middle. The Stryker is not really an armored car but a troop transport, and while I was willing to give the Stryker the benefit of the doubt, I was stunned to find that it weighs twice as much as the fully-tracked M-113 troop carrier, which provides better armor.
But a tracked vehicle is hard pressed to maintain convoy speeds that we need. They can do it for awhile, but every other day for months on end? It would become a worse maintenance nightmare.
Supposedly there is a new kid in town, the "Guardian", a 4-wheeled armored car supplied to MPs for convoy escort duty. It is a true armored car, basically a fast, mobile machine-gun nest with armor. I don't know much about it, as the Army has been incredibly stingy in doling them out.
Has anyone heard much about the "Guardian", why it isn't deployed in greater numbers, and if it is in fact any good? Or why the US Army, of all the world forces, cannot accept that there are times when an armored car is handy? Most of the combat ops in theater are convoy escorts, and as has been popularly reported by news media, we have nothing truly equipped to handle it. The French have the Panhards, the English has (or had) Alvis, the Brizilians have the Engesa EE-9 Cascavel...
Just a vent with a question thrown in to boot...
PS-- Thanks, Mike!!
