By Emelie Rutherford
Plans are being made to send thousands of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) from Iraq to overseas-storage facilities and domestic bases because of the drawdown of U.S. troops, Army and Marine Corps officials said.
The military services over the past two years have tapped multiple contractors for just over 16,200 of the underbelly-blast-deflecting MRAPs. Most of those hulking vehicles in Iraq–where the majority of the 10,000-plus MRAPs in theater reside–will not be sent to Afghanistan, despite the troop buildup, because they are not well suited for the Afghan terrain.
The Army currently plans to use just 2,675 MRAPs–out of its planned cadre of 12,000 mine-proof vehicles–in Afghanistan, said Army Lt. Gen. Ross Thompson, military deputy to the Army’s top acquisition official. He was quizzed last Thursday on Capitol Hill about the fate of the multi-billion-dollar vehicle fleet.
“We have looked at the enduring requirement for MRAPs,” Thompson told the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee (HAC-D).
Of the Army’s 12,000 planned MRAPs, roughly 9,500 vehicles have been identified for prepositioned storage, training, and other continued use in the force structure, he said.
“We haven’t gotten to the end-state yet on how we would use the other 2,500,” Thompson said. “Maybe some more of those will go into force structure. That’s the ongoing analysis….And foreign-military sales or leaving some of them behind with the Iraqi forces is certainly a possibility.”
The Army recently began executing a plan to ship the oldest MRAP variants to the United States for pre-deployment training, and expects the first vehicles to arrive in April, Army officials said in written testimony.
“There’s a need right now for 702 training vehicles to (alleviate) some of the training concerns that we’ve had with soldiers going over” without being trained on operating the large vehicles, said Lt. Gen. James Thurman, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations.
The Army has looked at putting some of its Iraq MRAPs into enabling formations such as maneuver-enhancement brigades and sustainment brigades, Thurman told lawmakers.
“We’re working right now, working with our Training and Doctrine Command, to see how we document these vehicles and put them in the actual force-structure requirement,” he said.
Additional Army MRAPs will be sent to prepositioned stocks overseas, Thurman said, without providing vehicle tallies.
Military and congressional officials have said they expect a large chunk of MRAPs to end up in such storage facilities, including those in Kuwait.
The Marine Corps plans to keep only approximately 800 of its 2,225 MRAPs with operating forces, and send the bulk of them to prepositioned stocks “for use in an area that they would be well-suited to be operated,” said Marine Lt. Gen. George Flynn, the deputy commandant for combat development and integration.
“We’re still working through the plan, but that’s the general approach right now,” Flynn told the HAC-D last Thursday. Some of the Marine Corps’ MRAPs could end up in seabased prepositioned stocks, he said.
The Marine Corps and Army are conducting a competition for the MRAP All-Terrain Vehicle (M-ATV), a lighter and more maneuverable MRAP intended for Afghanistan. The Army’s M-ATV requirement is for 2,080 vehicles, which would complement the 2,675 traditional MRAPs the service plans to use in Afghanistan, Thompson said.