Mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs, have saved countless lives in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as their special design absorbs the effects of mines and improvised explosive devices. The U.S. military began ordering almost 28,000 of these heavily armored trucks in 2007, with most of them sent to Iraq, where the Army and Marine Corps put them to use clearing the way for convoys navigating risky terrain.
But as the military transitions away from these stability operations and toward a leaner force that will fight shorter conflicts from greater distances, the question of what to do with these vehicles highlights the broader challenges raised by procurement during wartime as well as the logistics of disposing of hardware in the aftermath of conflict.
"Getting this many MRAPs certainly wasn't stupid. It's just going to be more expensive than most people think in the long run to sustain them,” Lt. Col. (ret.) David Johnson, executive director of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, told Trend Lines. “And it is difficult to define the appropriate level of retention for these vehicles.”