I wrote a post earlier this year defending Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for his comment that you go to war with the Army you have.

The main point is that you plan for what you think the future battlefield will look like. You model your tactics and weapons around how you plan to fight on said battlefield. The problem is that the battlefield you end up on rarely looks like the one you trained for and designed your equipment for. Every war that the U.S. has ever been in has gone this way. It is just how things are.

But. You adapt. That is what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. We are adapting. We are changing tactics. We are redesigning vehicles. We are developing new vehicles.

Enter MUV-R or Mine-protected Utility Vehicle/Rapid Deployable:

It is not very pretty to look at, but it is one of several new designs out there being developed and tested to meet the newly discovered threats of IED’s.

“As new technologies emerge, the Army is aggressively working with industry to develop, test, produce, and rapidly field the best possible equipment, and get it into the hands of our soldiers in the field as soon as possible,” Col. Curry said
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When IED-attack reports first began streaming in, the Pentagon began looking into blast-protective designs similar to those of the old South African army and police vehicles. Those designs included seamless single-piece armor hulls with V-shaped bottoms that naturally provided better side impact protection from IEDs and below-vehicle blasts from mines.

And so it continues. Our enemy improvises, we adapt. It is the law of war. I am glad we have people hard at work figuring out new ways to keep our soldiers safe and to kill our enemies more efficiently.