USA Today: Humvee Doors Jam In Combat

First we send our troops into combat with vehicles lacking proper armor. We eventually up-armor a lot of them. Unfortunately, this increases the weight of Humvee doors up to 600 lbs.!

Humvees were not originally designed to sport 600 lbs. doors. Surprise! These doors now have an alarming tendency to jam shut during combat.

Check out this story in yesterday's USA Today: Humvee doors can trap troops

No worries. The Army says it has a "quick fix": they're welding "D" rings to the doors. That's a whole lotta welding. There are approximately 18,000 Humvees in Iraq.

It's supposed to work like this:

When these Humvee doors jam during combat or an IED attack or an EVD attack, troops in another vehicle hop out. They attach a cable to the jammed Humvees "D" ring. This cable is run back and attached to the "rescue" vehicle. The jammed Humvee door is then ripped off by the "rescue" vehicle.

Who the fuck are these people kidding? This is how the Army recommends opening Humvee doors jammed shut during combat? If Plan "A" doesn't or can't work what is Plan "B"? Blow the doors off with an RPG? What part of combat do they not understand? The rescuers are supposed to completely stop their vehicle, get out, run back and forth connecting and disconnecting cables  not to mention pick up the Humvees' wounded and/or stranded troops. They are supposed to be able to do this while under fire?!? Even if the troops trapped in the Humvee are "fortunate" enough to not already be burning to death, it puts all at an outrageous risk.

To think we would have learned about this problem even sooner if the DOD had not had so many problems and delays up-armoring vehicles to better protect our soldier-citizens.

Each time I think I couldn't be more disgusted I'm proven wrong again.

AF