“[W]hy do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don’t we have those resources readily available to us?” Army Spc. Thomas Wilson famously asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in December 2004.
Rumsfeld memorably responded: “As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”
Saying that the Army was working to armor vehicles “at a good clip,” Rumsfeld added: “And if you think about it, you can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up.”
The exchange sparked a national outcry, and in response the Army ramped up production of heavily armored Humvees.
Now a special report from the Dayton Daily News has focused attention on another significant danger posed by Humvees to soldiers in Iraq: the possibility that their vehicles, which were designed neither for combat nor for the massive amount of armor many now bear, will kill them simply by rolling over.
“Since the start of the war, Congress and the Army have spent tens of millions of dollars on armor for the Humvee fleet in Iraq,” the Daily News‘s Russell Carollo and Mike Wagner reported in their main story Sunday, saying that the armor “has shielded soldiers from harm.”
But the protection, they added, “has come at a deadly price”: “The heavy armor has made the vehicle more difficult to control and more likely to roll over, especially when operated in the harsh conditions in Iraq that include night missions, primitive roads and unforgiving terrain.”
Analyzing records from the Army’s ground accident database through November 2005, the Daily News “found that 60 of the 85 soldiers who died in Humvee accidents in Iraq — or 70 percent — were killed when the vehicle rolled. Of the 337 injuries, 149 occurred in rollovers.”
The newspaper’s six-month investigation also found that serious accidents involving the M1114 factory-armored Humvee — the current workhorse of the Humvee fleet in Iraq which, at 9,800 pounds, weighs far more than the standard Army M1097 model or Humvees retrofitted with armor — “have increased steadily as the war has progressed” and they have been put to greater use. Accidents in the M1114 were also “much more likely to be rollovers than those in other Humvee models”: “Of the 38 soldiers who died in accidents involving the M1114 worldwide since the beginning of the Iraq war, 34 were killed in rollovers. Of the 64 soldiers killed in other types of Humvees during that period, 36 died in rollover accidents.”
“The whole thing is a formula for disaster,” Scott Badenoch, a vehicle dynamics expert now working with the military to devise a lighter armored replacement for the Humvee, told the paper. “I believe the up-armoring has caused more deaths than it has saved.”
“We’re putting [on] all this armor. It’s a lot of armor, and it’s heavy on a vehicle it wasn’t designed to be on,” said Gary Caille, a Georgia Tech Research Institute program manager studying how new military vehicles can be created. “And then we’re looking surprised when it doesn’t function that way.”
The Dayton story has a local angle — a secondary piece focuses on a nearby factory which now produces about 650 armored Humvees per month — but it also has national reach, as it describes in detail many of the deaths of soldiers who have died from rollovers.
Among those lost were two National Guardsmen from Magnolia, Miss. who drowned “when their Humvee rolled over into a canal”; Sgt. Travis L. Burkhardt, who was killed when “his Humvee hit a piece of concrete, causing the vehicle to flip end over end”; and Spc. Daniel James McConnell, whose retrofitted Humvee traveled atop an aqueduct for twenty feet before it “rolled on its right side, fell 19 1/2 feet and landed on its top in the streambed,” crushing McConnell to death.
Two soldiers from the Arkansas National Guard were luckier: While the weight of their retrofitted Humvee caused the edge of a narrow roadway to crumble, sending the vehicle sliding and rolling into an irrigation canal, the soldiers, despite being “underwater for more than five minutes, were rescued and survived.”
Compared to the number of soldiers being killed in Iraq by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) or more conventional means, the casualties from Humvee rollovers, and Humvee accidents in general, is not large. And as an Army spokesman told the paper (after the service shied away from the Daily News‘s questions over the past two months), the Army is working to address the problem.
But it’s still a disturbing problem — and, as Daily News editor Jeff Bruce wrote, “Given the clamor to provide our troops with more armor, it is important that the public understand that it has come with a price.”
Edward B. Colby was a writer at CJR Daily.