I'm not disagreeing with you at all.
However, it's pretty clear that the US did not buy enough GP-type "armored" vehicles to do what we're attempting to do over there.
In fact, we really didn't procure much in the way of "armored" GP vehicles at all.
Those Cougars look nice... but the contract was $10 million for 40 of them, about $250K each.
Right now an armored Humvee is about $150K.
I'd cheerfully ante up on my taxes to pay for the better vehicle but it's going to take a while to catch up, eh?
How come the crystal ball wasn't showing the need and the President wasn't asking for the $$$$ back in 1997 when Force Protection, the company that makes Cougars, started up?
I also wonder if, way back in 1983 the military had specified a Cougar-like GP vehicle and we now had tens of thousands of those in Iraq, would the enemy still use IEDs as their main weapon?
I mean, if ALL our vehicles were heavily armored to the point that IEDs were ineffective, the enemy would change tactics, wouldn't they?
Is it possible for all our operations to be impregnable to any tactic they can devise? Would they just not seek out another weakness?
Yeah, the Humvees suck at what they are being used to do, given the enemies tactics.
Could this have been foreseen in 1983 before we settled on it as the GP vehicle?
Could our present "battle plan" have been altered so that the Humvee's vulnerability to IEDs could not be exploited? If so, how? Do we have enough other armored vehicles to fill the transportation needs?
Does ANYONE doubt that this experience will cause significant change in our military vehicles? Sure it will. See, you build your new stuff based on your past experience.
We'll improve our GP vehicles. Our enemies will then look for a different weakness to exploit or tactics/weapons to negate our improvements.
All that being said, I didn't like the Humvee when it was first approved. There were lots of folks saying that based on what was happening in South Africa and Israel/Palestine that it needed to be significantly armored.
We have to live with it now and patch it as fast as we can.