Big Armored Vehicles' Big Surprise

Wow, imagine this. The Pentagon just might not need all of the big, honkin' armored vehicles that the Army and Marine Corps have demanded. The extraordinarily heavily things, costing up to $2-3 million each, just might present some operational deployment issues. From Defense News (subscription required):

*The Pentagon will store thousands of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, DoD’s [Department of Defense's] top procurement official told lawmakers Nov. 8. *

“We might not need as many as we are buying. Some will be stored for a period of time,” said John Young, the defense acquisition undersecretary. “The service chiefs have indicated that these are heavy, large vehicles that might not fit well with mobile expeditionary missions.”

Young told the House Armed Services Committee and other congressional panels that he had asked service chiefs to assess their plans for the more than 15,000 MRAPs DoD intends to buy and ship to Iraq and Afghanistan by 2010.
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December could see the next wave of MRAP orders — perhaps several thousand vehicles, far more than previous batches, industry and government officials said. Vehicle makers had been asking the Pentagon to keep the orders large to reduce cost. DoD spokeswoman Cheryl Irwin declined to speculate on upcoming orders.

Yes, who could have foreseen that a hasty, emotional call to procure very expensive, hard-to-build defense systems -- driven by Congress to bypass the standard requirements process -- might spiral out of control?

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* Armor-Makers "Risked Soldiers' Lives," Says Pentagon I.G.
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