THE FACTS ON HUMVEE ARMOR
Thursday, Lieutenant General R. Steven Whitcomb,Commander, Third Army "Patton's Own,"
and Coalition Forces Land Component Command, answered some questions, regarding the
armoring of vehicles in Iraq, including humvess.
These are some of the facts the three star General shared with the press:
"Congress has provided in the neighborhood of about $1.2 billion since last year strictly to armor
our vehicles"
"Up-armored humvees... is a vehicle that is produced in a factory back in the United States and it
essentially gives you protection, both glass and on the armament on the side, front, rear, sides, top
and bottom. If you'll think of a protection in a bubble, that's kind of what the level-one up-
armored humvee gives you."
"Back in August of 2003, we were producing about 30 of those vehicles a month. We're in the
category now of over 400 per month being produced. The requirement that we've got from
Multinational Corps Iraq and Multinational Force Iraq, General Casey and General Tom Metz, are
for about 8,100 up-armored humvees. We've provided a little under 6,000 up-armored
humvees to the force to date."
(Started using) "add-on kits that we might be able to produce that gave that vehicle additional
protection.We call that level-two armor, and it's better known probably most places as add-on
armor. It is factory produced, so it's built under controlled conditions, and then it's either -- can be
put on back in the states. But we've got 10 sites here in the theater, a couple here in Kuwait,
and eight sites up in Iraq itself where we can bolt on, add this armor to existing unarmored
vehicles. It gives you protection front, rear and sides, glass. It does not give protection at the
top or at the bottom of the vehicle. So it gives you better than what you have with no
protection on a humvee, but not quite the level-one protection."
"We looked at a stop-gap measure, a bridge, if you will, till we got the factory-produced level two
and the level one protection for our vehicles, and that's what we call level-three hardening.(It
consists of) taking steel plates that have been approved, make sure that they've got the type of
minimal protection. Our real focus for the level-three armor is not the humvees, it's really the
series of trucks that the Army uses in combat operations."
"Right now...we've got about 30,000 wheeled vehicles in our theater -- in Iraq and Afghanistan and
other areas."
level one, about 6,000 vehicles;
level two, about 10,000 vehicles;
almost 4,500 vehicles that have the level- three protection
8,000 (vehicles) do not have some type of armor protection on them.
"Of those vehicles that don't, some number of them are things like tool trucks, communication
vans or vehicles that don't leave the base camp. In other words, they're trucked up into Iraq --
or in cases before what we're doing now, were driven up into Iraq -- and they go onto a base
camp, and that's where they spend most of their time."
"The humvee was a vehicle that was not designed to afford armor protection, nor were most
of our trucks. They were designed as cargo carriers. The only up-armored humvees, the high-end
ones, we had were for our military police forces. They were not for use by -- as we see them used
today with the numbers of forces."
"Add-on armoring runs anywhere from about a thousand pounds of steel plating up to about 4,000
pounds of additional weight. So a lot of our vehicles, as you point out, are not designed -- their
engines aren't designed to carry perhaps an additional ton of weight, the suspension and the
transmission."
"I am not seeing constraints on resources that are -- allow us to do that, with the exception
of, as I say, level one and -- primarily because you're producing vehicles and a certain amount of
law of physics is involved here. It's not necessarily just money; it's a production capacity to be
able to build more."
"When you combine the 6,000 and the almost 10,000, we're in relatively good shape humvee-
wise."
"The other thing that we've got -- and I won't talk about it because it is very sensitive -- is we're
leveraging technology, how to detect where IEDs are, who's using them, how they're being
set off and those kinds of things so we could go out there early and kill those guys before they're
able to execute."
Regarding the soldier who asked Secretary Rumsfeld the armor question, General Whitcomb said:
"What I think Specialist Wilson(soldier that popped the humvee question on Rumsfeld) was
probably talking about is going through a facility that we've got that takes vehicles of two types;
one, it takes vehicles that have been hit in combat and can't be fixed in Iraq and we bring them
back here into Kuwait and we either fix them or we take parts off them that we can use. And
some of those parts may, in fact, be the level-three armor, the steel plating that we either take off
and put into stacks that we'll reuse, or that my suspicion -- and it's a suspicion only -- is that
Specialist Wilson and his crew came in and found a vehicle or found some of that stuff and was
taking it to add on to their vehicles."
SOURCE: (U.S. Department of Defense)
Here some other facts, compiled from various sources:
Today 77% of Humvees in Iraq are armored
9,386 armor kits shipped to Iraq
9,143 have been installed (97%)
Armor Holdings (AH:NYSE) said it could boost its output of "up-armored" Humvees by as
much as 22 percent per month to 550 from 450 now.
The cost of installing the Humvee armor at the factory is $58,000 a vehicle.
Link
Thursday, Lieutenant General R. Steven Whitcomb,Commander, Third Army "Patton's Own,"
and Coalition Forces Land Component Command, answered some questions, regarding the
armoring of vehicles in Iraq, including humvess.
These are some of the facts the three star General shared with the press:
"Congress has provided in the neighborhood of about $1.2 billion since last year strictly to armor
our vehicles"
"Up-armored humvees... is a vehicle that is produced in a factory back in the United States and it
essentially gives you protection, both glass and on the armament on the side, front, rear, sides, top
and bottom. If you'll think of a protection in a bubble, that's kind of what the level-one up-
armored humvee gives you."
"Back in August of 2003, we were producing about 30 of those vehicles a month. We're in the
category now of over 400 per month being produced. The requirement that we've got from
Multinational Corps Iraq and Multinational Force Iraq, General Casey and General Tom Metz, are
for about 8,100 up-armored humvees. We've provided a little under 6,000 up-armored
humvees to the force to date."
(Started using) "add-on kits that we might be able to produce that gave that vehicle additional
protection.We call that level-two armor, and it's better known probably most places as add-on
armor. It is factory produced, so it's built under controlled conditions, and then it's either -- can be
put on back in the states. But we've got 10 sites here in the theater, a couple here in Kuwait,
and eight sites up in Iraq itself where we can bolt on, add this armor to existing unarmored
vehicles. It gives you protection front, rear and sides, glass. It does not give protection at the
top or at the bottom of the vehicle. So it gives you better than what you have with no
protection on a humvee, but not quite the level-one protection."
"We looked at a stop-gap measure, a bridge, if you will, till we got the factory-produced level two
and the level one protection for our vehicles, and that's what we call level-three hardening.(It
consists of) taking steel plates that have been approved, make sure that they've got the type of
minimal protection. Our real focus for the level-three armor is not the humvees, it's really the
series of trucks that the Army uses in combat operations."
"Right now...we've got about 30,000 wheeled vehicles in our theater -- in Iraq and Afghanistan and
other areas."
level one, about 6,000 vehicles;
level two, about 10,000 vehicles;
almost 4,500 vehicles that have the level- three protection
8,000 (vehicles) do not have some type of armor protection on them.
"Of those vehicles that don't, some number of them are things like tool trucks, communication
vans or vehicles that don't leave the base camp. In other words, they're trucked up into Iraq --
or in cases before what we're doing now, were driven up into Iraq -- and they go onto a base
camp, and that's where they spend most of their time."
"The humvee was a vehicle that was not designed to afford armor protection, nor were most
of our trucks. They were designed as cargo carriers. The only up-armored humvees, the high-end
ones, we had were for our military police forces. They were not for use by -- as we see them used
today with the numbers of forces."
"Add-on armoring runs anywhere from about a thousand pounds of steel plating up to about 4,000
pounds of additional weight. So a lot of our vehicles, as you point out, are not designed -- their
engines aren't designed to carry perhaps an additional ton of weight, the suspension and the
transmission."
"I am not seeing constraints on resources that are -- allow us to do that, with the exception
of, as I say, level one and -- primarily because you're producing vehicles and a certain amount of
law of physics is involved here. It's not necessarily just money; it's a production capacity to be
able to build more."
"When you combine the 6,000 and the almost 10,000, we're in relatively good shape humvee-
wise."
"The other thing that we've got -- and I won't talk about it because it is very sensitive -- is we're
leveraging technology, how to detect where IEDs are, who's using them, how they're being
set off and those kinds of things so we could go out there early and kill those guys before they're
able to execute."
Regarding the soldier who asked Secretary Rumsfeld the armor question, General Whitcomb said:
"What I think Specialist Wilson(soldier that popped the humvee question on Rumsfeld) was
probably talking about is going through a facility that we've got that takes vehicles of two types;
one, it takes vehicles that have been hit in combat and can't be fixed in Iraq and we bring them
back here into Kuwait and we either fix them or we take parts off them that we can use. And
some of those parts may, in fact, be the level-three armor, the steel plating that we either take off
and put into stacks that we'll reuse, or that my suspicion -- and it's a suspicion only -- is that
Specialist Wilson and his crew came in and found a vehicle or found some of that stuff and was
taking it to add on to their vehicles."
SOURCE: (U.S. Department of Defense)
Here some other facts, compiled from various sources:
Today 77% of Humvees in Iraq are armored
9,386 armor kits shipped to Iraq
9,143 have been installed (97%)
Armor Holdings (AH:NYSE) said it could boost its output of "up-armored" Humvees by as
much as 22 percent per month to 550 from 450 now.
The cost of installing the Humvee armor at the factory is $58,000 a vehicle.
Link
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