MRAP Joins Sheriff's Department After Serving in Iraq

Six-wheeled Iraq veteran joins sheriff's department
Southeast Missourian
By Emily Priddy
Friday, March 21, 2014

Lt. Chris Hull with the Cape Girardeau County Sheriff's Department, opens the 700-pound driver's side door to the department's new mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle Friday afternoon.
(Laura Simon)

If Batman owned a station wagon, it might look a little like the Cape Girardeau County Sheriff's Department's newest vehicle.

The department recently acquired a 31-ton, six-wheeled Iraq War veteran capable of hauling eight to 11 people through ice, high water and improvised explosive devices.

"It's seriously armored. They made these things to protect the troops from IEDs," said Lt. Chris Hull of the Cape Girardeau County Sheriff's Department.

The vehicle, called an MRAP -- an acronym for mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle -- had 20 miles on its odometer when the U.S. Department of Defense transferred it to the county, Hull said.

"It was a vehicle that we acquired through the DOD program where they demilitarize certain pieces of equipment from the military and offer it to law enforcement," he said.

The department announced the acquisition on Facebook, where Hull said some "haters" were questioning why a local law-enforcement agency would need such a powerful tool.

"It was free," he said. "It was offered to us. ... Even if this thing gets utilized one time or so and it saves someone's life, it's well worth it."

Hull said several thousand of the vehicles exist, but only 350 were reconditioned for police use before the federal government canceled the program; the rest will be scrapped.
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MRAPS and horseback

MRAPs reducing IED deaths in Afghanistan

Vehicles have reduced deaths and injuries by 30 percent since 2009
By Tom Vanden Brook - USA TODAY
Posted : Tuesday Sep 7, 2010 13:38:22 EDT

WASHINGTON — The military’s new armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles in Afghanistan are significantly reducing troop deaths in roadside attacks at a time when insurgent bombings are at record levels, according to statistics provided to USA TODAY.

Deaths of U.S. and allied troops fell from 76 in July 2009 to 57 in July of this year, according to the military command in Afghanistan.

Nearly 80 percent of roadside bomb attacks on Humvees from January 2009 through the end of July 2010 killed occupants, according to Air Force Maj. Michael Johnson, a spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force, the top command in Afghanistan. That figure dropped to 15 percent for attacks on MRAP vehicles, and an all-terrain MRAP model tailor-made for Afghanistan’s rugged terrain. The trucks are designed to shield people from roadside bomb blasts.
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MRAPs reducing IED deaths in Afghanistan

Ft. Carson Special Forces train on horseback

By Lance Benzel - The (Colorado Springs) Gazette via AP
Posted : Tuesday Sep 7, 2010 13:37:49 EDT

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — Before dawn one recent morning, as much of the city slept, a small group of elite Fort Carson soldiers was choppered onto a mountain clearing near Colorado Springs and left to find its way down — in the dark, on horseback.

It’s an image straight out of a military thriller, but it’s exactly how Green Berets from the post’s 10th Special Forces Group have been training for upcoming operations.

The horsemanship training at the Stables at the Broadmoor — which began in late July and concluded last week — offers a rare glimpse at what the unit expects on the battlefield.

Not that you’ll hear that from the horse’s mouth, so to speak.

“This is basic training for Special Forces,” said 10th Special Forces Group spokesman Lt. Col. Steve Osterholzer, downplaying the maneuvers as “standard stuff” for soldiers who use nontraditional means to get in and out of the hostile areas where they battle insurgents under the cloak of secrecy.
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Ft. Carson Special Forces train on horseback

Marines want probe into armored vehicle program

Marines want probe into armored vehicle program
delays
Story Highlights
Corps asks Pentagon to look into why specially armored vehicles were delayed

Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles arrived in large numbers in 2007

Internal report says earlier delivery could have prevented deaths, wounds

Suicide bomber kills 9 in northern Iraq, military says

From Barbara Starr
CNN

(CNN) -- Casualties could have been reduced by half among Marines in Iraq if specially armored vehicles had been deployed more quickly in some cases, a report to the Pentagon says.

Marine Corps spokesman Col. David Lapan said the Defense Department's inspector general wants to investigate the report's claims that bureaucratic delays undermined the program to develop the armored vehicles.

The program was designed to provide combat forces with Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, known by the acronym MRAPs.

The Marine Corps requested an investigation last week after receiving Marine technology expert Franz Gayl's report.

"If the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005 in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time, as the USMC is doing today, hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented," Gayl wrote in the report.
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http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/02/26/iraq.main/


How many lost their lives because of this? Got blown up? Ended up with TBI and PTSD?

Gross mismanagement caused deaths and injured in Iraq

Study: Lack of MRAPs cost Marine lives

By RICHARD LARDNER
Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

The study, written by a civilian Marine Corps official and obtained by The Associated Press, accuses the service of "gross mismanagement" that delayed deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.

Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the so-called MRAPs, according to the study. Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which can cost as much as a $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded.

After Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared the MRAP (pronounced M-rap) the Pentagon's No. 1 acquisition priority in May 2007, the trucks began to be shipped to Iraq in large quantities.
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