Leviathan

Alex at Yorkshire Ranter has a fantastic post on the MRAP. A taste:

Essentially, they are six-wheeled buses surrounded by huge amounts of armour protection of various kinds, intended to be safer for the occupants than the Humvees and trucks they have so far been using. But the enemy is already countering them, by the simple and cheap means of building bigger bombs, or organising attacks with multiple bombs. Given the insane quantities of money it has cost to field what are basically armoured buses, this is not the road to success.

Of course, if you’re a tom in Iraq, you’d rather travel in one of these than in a Humvee. But what mission are they meant to conduct? Building really heavily armoured patrol vehicles implies that you’re going to be driving around in small groups of vehicles full of soldiers a lot, in an environment where you’re under constant IED threat. They’re not suited to use on an active battlefield, and they’re so big they aren’t very airportable. Every artefact is an ideology made manifest; this one manifests the idea that it’s possible to fight this kind of war without contact with your environment. What are the soldiers in the back doing? They can’t see much out of the vehicle; they can’t hear what goes on outside for engine noise; probably no-one in the vehicle would understand what the people are saying anyway.

And we’ve decided to accept this state of affairs, and build a mobile wall to keep it out.