Europe responds to IED threat with blast-resistant vehicles

Printed headline: Safe Haven

Roadside explosives are among the deadliest weapons facing U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The ubiquitous improvised explosive device has killed and wounded thousands of soldiers in both theaters. The success of its low-tech lethality exposed a major vulnerability in operations and paved the way for introduction of more sophisticated weapons like explosively formed penetrators, which can destroy even heavily armored vehicles.

Efforts to counter these threats is giving rise to one of the largest development and procurement efforts for land forces in years: heavily armored vehicles that are engineered to withstand roadside bombs, land mines and projectiles, and protect occupants from serious injuries or death. At least a dozen countries are building or ordering vehicles, or doing both. The value of all programs will run well into the tens of billions of dollars.

Perhaps the best known program is in the U.S., where the Pentagon has authorized the purchase of 22,000 MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected) vehicles through 2010 that will replace Humvees and lightly armored trucks (DTI July/August, p. 23). The MRAP program was announced last year. Production and orders have ramped up faster than suppliers and procurement officials expected (see also DTI March, p. 25).

Armed forces elsewhere have been developing such vehicles since at least 2004. Some nations (notably Israel and South Africa) have lengthy experience in designing and building protected vehicles that are light and mobile, yet protect riders from most land mines, IEDs and small-arms fire.

The stakes are high for these programs, as seen in the casualty figures from Iraq alone. According to one source, 1,582 of the 3,683 U.S. combat deaths in Iraq through Aug. 7 were caused by IEDs -- a 43% rate.

Requirements are changing as attackers develop more effective weapons. In July, in what was described as one of the biggest roadside blasts in Afghanistan, six Canadian soldiers and their Afghan translator were killed when a bomb destroyed an RG-31 Nyala, a 7.28-ton, 4 X 4 wheeled vehicle developed in South Africa and built by BAE Land Systems. The Nyala is designed to resist the simultaneous detonation of two anti-tank mines, and has been regarded as the "least vulnerable of Canadian fighting vehicles in Afghanistan," according to a report in Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper.