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I put up a gallery of the pictures that my brother sent me of his unit training with the new MRAP vehicles. As the unit was supposed to be packing up for their deployment to Afghanistan, a few soldiers were selected to learn how to operate the military’s new trucks.

Here are some quick facts from Wikipedia’s page for the MRAP:

• MRAP stands for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected.
• MRAPs are a family of vehicles rather than just one design like the Hummer or M1A1 Abrams.
• There are no common designs since a number of vendors supply their own versions.
• The MRAP program is being funded through an “emergency war budget”.
• Since making the vehicles available to soldiers in the field was a priority, the military granted contracts to a number of vendors to speed up manufacturing.
• The hulls are V-shaped to deflect energy away from the vehicles.
• Because of the weight combined with the design, a high center of gravity makes the MRAPs susceptible to rollovers from poor road conditions.
• An MRAP II program has been initiated to develop a new vehicle in order to better protect against explosively formed penetrators (EFP) which use shaped charges to form a jet of metal to cut through armor.

From the pictures that my brother sent me, it looks like they were being trained to use FPI’s Cougar. They come in both a 4×4 and a 6×6 version. Over 3500 vehicles are expected to be delivered by the end of 2008. There’s been a number of Cougar’s that were subjected to IEDs and mines in Iraq and Afghanistan where crew members survived the blasts with some of the trucks still operational enough to get to safety.

Photo: A Cougar MRAP after driving over a mine. All crew survived with minor injuries and the Cougar was driven two miles to safety on three wheels after the explosion.

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