Iraq and the armor crisis

1996 – 2007

A vehicle used past its design: The Humvee went to Iraq in 2003 as it had been designed — a light, unarmored truck for work behind the front line — and the war it met was an insurgency, in which there was no behind-the-lines. The reference history states the consequence plainly: with the onset of the Iraq War, Humvees proved very vulnerable to improvised explosive devices; in the first four months of 2006, 67 United States troops died in Humvees. Both figures of speech in that record — the design intent and the toll — are printed here as the record carries them, because the gap between them is the story of the vehicle's second decade and of the Mishawaka plant's hardest production years.

The December 2004 reckoning: The crisis became public in December 2004, when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, questioned by troops in Kuwait about the shortage of armored vehicles, answered that armor kits were being manufactured in increasing numbers but that before the war they had been produced only in small quantities, as the Army's role shifted from fighting a field army to suppressing an insurgency. The documented production curve behind the answer belongs to the Army's up-armor program as a whole: lines that could produce 30 up-armored M1114s a month in May 2003 were producing 400 a month by December 2004 and 650 a month by September 2005, with 13,000 armor kits produced in total by May 2005. The M1114 itself — factory-armored, in limited production at Mishawaka since 1996 — was the vehicle at the center of the surge, and the reference history records that AM General diverted the majority of its manufacturing power to producing the armored vehicles. Over 10,000 HMMWVs were employed by coalition forces during the Iraq War.

The consequence: The armor crisis ended the Humvee's tenure as the Army's universal light vehicle. The Marine Corps decided in 2007 to begin replacing Humvees in combat roles with MRAP vehicles — mine-resistant trucks designed around the IED threat — and the Army's longer answer was a new vehicle program entirely, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, whose production contract AM General would win, and contest, sixteen years later. The Humvee line at Mishawaka did not end: it settled into the up-armored, export, and support roles the contracts below describe, and it is building still.

Sources:

1. Humvee reference history — the Iraq vulnerability record, the first-four-months-of-2006 toll as carried there, the December 2004 Rumsfeld exchange, the diversion of AM General's manufacturing to armored production, over 10,000 HMMWVs in the Iraq War, the 2007 Marine Corps MRAP decision.
2. GlobalSecurity, XM1114/M1114 up-armored HMMWV program record — the M1114 production-rate course, 30 per month (May 2003) to 400 (December 2004) to 650 (September 2005), and 13,000 armor kits by May 2005, as Army program figures.