No MRAPs for you

“If an [Armored Brigade Combat Team] is ordered to deploy, the odds are that it will deploy with its own equipment,” Kepley and Harper write. In short, if you don’t already have MRAPs, tough luck.

Of course, the Army never planned for MRAPs to be a permanent part of the force even as the Pentagon began buying tens of thousands of them starting in 2007. The military assigned the vehicles to almost all units headed to Iraq and Afghanistan, cost be damned.

The MRAPs’ angular hulls and special armor mix helped protect against deadly roadside bombs, saving potentially thousands of lives. But the million-dollar vehicles were an expensive ad hoc solution to an urgent problem. Early on, the Army gave little thought to what it would do with the trucks after the wars.

In 2011, the ground branch did imply that it would try to make the MRAPs a permanent part of selected logistics brigades and medical, route-clearance and bomb-disposal units. The Army said it would add the trucks “as feasible” to some units’ Modified Tables of Order and Equipment.

MTOEs are official Army documents that describe the total number of personnel, vehicles, weapons and other equipment any certain type of unit gets. The ground combat branch regularly adds or subtracts items from these charts.

But units whose organizational charts don’t now include MRAPs can’t assume they’ll get the trucks in the future, even in the event of a wartime deployment. “Units will not likely draw and sign for a fleet of [MRAPs] if they are not authorized on the MTOE,” Kepley and Harper write.

Still, the Army plans to keep thousands MRAPs in storage, for use in extreme emergencies. The government is disposing of thousands more of the war-weary trucks, selling or donating them to other agencies and foreign allies. Leftover MRAPs are destined for the scrap heap.