By Emelie Rutherford
While the Marine Corps is proceeding with a project to modify existing mine-resistant vehicles to prepare them for use in Afghanistan, the service also will likely buy some next-generation mine-deflecting vehicles under development, the service’s top officer said yesterday.
The Marine Corps “is not waiting for” the forthcoming M-ATVs, which are all-terrain versions of the popular Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs), Commandant Gen. James Conway told reporters on Capitol Hill. Still, Conway said, in the future: “We will probably still need some M-ATVs, because not every column is going to be strictly MRAPs.”
“Where there’s a need for an up-armed Humvee, we may want to have a M-ATV in its place, when they come about,” he said. “But that is on down range from where we are right now.”
For the service’s more-immediate needs, it is adding independent-wheel suspensions to its category 1 MRAPs, to make them better suited for Afghanistan’s mountainous terrain. Those suspensions are the same as those used on the Medium Tactical Vehicle Replacement trucks (MTVRs).
Conway said he expected 40 of those modified MRAPs to be in theater by “the end of July.”
The category 1 MRAPs are the lightest category of the vehicles, and the type that dominate the Marine Corps’ 2,200-plus-vehicle MRAP fleet. Putting the MTVR suspensions on them, Conway said, makes them offroad-capable and ensures they can be fielded “to our troops much, much sooner than we would if we waited (for) the development of the M-ATV.”