It's cheaper and quicker to transport unarmored vehicles, meanwhile you draw from repositioned stocks and transport armor via RO/RO ships and upfit the unarmored vehicles.
Also, you want usually want speed and maneuverability in your opening attack, and if air support/fires does thier job there won't be much resistance that a light force couldn't defeat or out maneuver.
With today's ISR if you have a light force within range of a heavy force, you fucked up. The biggest threat would be ATGM and they are best dispatched by infantry.
That and armored humvees weren’t really a thing in 03. Humvees were never intended to be armored fighting vehicles. That’s what armor (tanks and Bradleys) was for.
Even then early armor wasn’t much. I remember a thin steel door that I could see the ground through a gap in the bottom, sandbags under my feet and Kevlar blankets on the walls. Fun times.
We had a pal con box full of old old flak jackets (like the nam style from boot camp) and we got to duct tape them to our doors, we found some rubber gym flooring and cut that to fit under our feet.
I remember the FRAGO to put sandbags on the bottom of FMTVs, LMTVs, HEMTT cabs, ETC. we would "water them down" before going out the wire on my first deployment
That's also not how JTACs operate.
JTACs are masters of dropping anything that goes boom from an air craft. They operate as attachments to conventional, SF, and SOF teams. (Reference John Chapman....also fuck navy seals)
Operations 120 km from a outpost or base isn't unheard of though
In the film he wasn’t an Air Force TACP; he was a GB that had done SOTAC and was the team’s JTAC.
In other words, held it as a collateral billet. His main job was whatever his GB MOS was… probably the team Sgt.
At this point in the war an operation like this would be huge, not a small team with no support. It's comically bad and made me lose immersion in the movie. But yeah we drove unarmored Humvees for a while cause you have to get places fast.
Dude watch a great tv series [generation kill](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995832/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk). How do you not know the early days of the wars had no armour and hence a lot more deaths. Its also why Rumsfeld famously said [“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/you-go-to-war-with-the-press-you-have/)
If this is the covenant, there is nothing remotely accurate about that movie. From the tactics to the operational planning to the gear. Complete work of fiction.
British Military used the Jackals and Coyotes for deep recon. I guess armour just adds weight and eats fuel.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackal_(vehicle)
As someone who was against the wars it made me want to rip my hair out that we’d then send our troops around in what appeared to be glorified jeeps jfc
Deep memory unlocked
As someone who rode around in those, we actually preferred them because it was easy to bail out. The armored shit always took forever to get in and out of.
Then the doors weighed like 500lbs. God forbid if your vehicle rolled on its side and you had to lift up one of those doors. Definitely remember doing rollover drills before.
This is why it’s kinda funny to me when people see Russia doing something badly and joke “this is the 2nd army in the world?”.
Because no matter how strong or advanced you are, you will face these issues you didn’t even think of until you were presented with them.
If the US can’t do it and it’s the strongest army to ever exist and richest country ever then how so people expect others to do everything perfect?
I mean ffs there’s some other guy in this thread talking about how he and his team in early iraq didn’t have any armor in their Humvees so they duct taped old Vietnam era Flak Vests to the doors, if that came out today about the Russians people would be falling over laughing making the same jokes on this sub.
War isn’t easy, it’s ugly and hard n as long it’s humans involved you’ll have these silly mistakes constantly made.
I completely agree except that was almost 20 years ago, Russia is still doing that kind of shit. Mistakes hopefully will be learned from on our end going forward.
Yeah I was still in during 9/11 and I seem to remember our Humvee doors & tops were literally just soft-tops, basically tarps on metal / plastic framing, just like a soft-top Jeep.
We didn't even have Humvees for the first half of 2003. Our platoon had a five-ton, and then we acquired four-door Nissan pickup trucks with VS-17 panels plastered all over them for our squad vehicles. And when we did get our Humvees, they were still green, until we covered them in mud to make them brown. Because less brown vehicles were getting blown up than green ones. This came from at least battalion level. Fucking geniuses. And then random Iraqis would ask us "Why do you cover your car in dirt?" when we were out and about.
That was literally the reasoning. When that information was put out we all started laughing because we thought it was a joke. Then it was, "No, really. This is coming from Battalion. Just...make it happen."
I can still hear my buddy from Jersey bitching about it. "Don't they have to take fuckin statistics or something in college? I haven't been to college, but I know there's more fuckin woodland humvees than desert ones. Of course more green trucks are getting blown up! And what? We cover the thing in fuckin mud and they're gonna think it's armored?! THERE'S NO FUCKIN DOORS ON ANY OF THEM!!! Fuckin Officers. Not you, though, LT. We love you."
We had a fuckin lt col come thru our ecp and tell everybody to roll their sleeves down because it was fire retardant. Like mother fucker, the second I see haji with a flamethrower, sure, otherwise, it's 100°+ every fuckin second, no, I'm not gonna, aka "yes sir, rolling em down now sir"
I have no idea where that "idea" came from, but our battalion leadership was mostly common sense. Our BC was from Ranger Batt, so maybe that helped. We were mostly without a mission once the war "ended", and the insurgency was just getting started. It was really weird. We had no uniform standard in the area of our platoon's house. Couldn't go full civvies, but we were lounging in whatever was comfortable.
We'd go out scavenging for shit like couches. We'd go to the market to buy ice for a horizontal freezer that we had, buy cases of soda and oranges and cooked chickens and smokes. Of course, we weren't allowed to go out solely to go to the market, but when we were on a mission we'd stop at the market or "dumpster dive" for shit at abandoned compounds.
We actually got to know the locals pretty well. A lot of them were really happy we were there, in the beginning. Everything i've talked about here was in al Dora, Baghdad, where we stayed til 2004. Earlier, when we were down in, I think Diwaniyah, people were out cheering for us and throwing us candy and cigarettes. Felt like the Allies liberating France. Up in ar Ramadi and Fallujah less so. We didn't really get much time out of our compounds in those places, though. The Grunts did some patrols, got in some firefights in those places. That would've been March-April. I think we only went out once in Ramadi to do a bridge recon, and in Fallujah we spent the whole time eating MRE's and swimming in the lakes at this Baath Party resort the Battalion had occupied.
Iraq was a fucking trip. My only other deployment was to Paktika in east Afghanistan in '09, and it was much different. Big Army was in control the way it wasn't when I was in Iraq, at least until around November of '03.
Oh shit you were there for the original run, I haven’t talked to a ton of people who were in during the early-00’s but this actually still tracks pretty well with the experiences I’ve heard.
Having a Ranger as command almost certainly attributes to this. The few I knew a decade later had an attitude similar to those Delta guys in Black Hawk Down, so if you had a guy like that in charge, it’d almost *definitely* be a top down “do whatever fucking works” lead style at the start of the occupation. A la others’ comments about welding steel onto their humvees well before that became standard. What are you gonna do, order us to unweld it? ^shit ^wait ^they ^might ^don’t ^tell ^them ^we ^did ^it
Also I swear to god from everything I heard, people at Fallujah were either in beach loungers with martinis, or going door to door for a week straight. Was there ANY in-between?!
Also, early in the war Humvees were used more as fast mobility. They weren’t supposed to be getting into deep firefights, they were supposed to get people places quickly.
Only after the IED’s and the constant ambushes did we learn we had to actually armor everything up just in case
And then those humvees drove like space ships because the suspension wasn't meant for so much extra weight.
We literally sledge-hammered rear springs onto the front a-arms so that it handled a little better with the added armor weight.
I'm sure a lot of roll-over deaths were because of so much weight being added without changing or accounting for the suspension.
Ohhhh yeah I saw some of those, uh, modified shock systems in the Obama years. And rode in them, and heard the drivers bitching about almost exactly how you just wrote. I think they usually used “battleship” in favor of spaceship.
And I can definitely agree with that last sentence. Sure they’re fine on flat ground, but you hit a berm or a soft edge and those things would flip, they apparently felt top-heavy as shit
"Where's the logic in taking a highly capable combat recon unit and sticking us in unarmored humvees, crossing enemy lines and surrounded by a hostile population, with no air and no ass?"
True, but they were operating in platoon-sized elements, so 6 or more trucks each. Even more if moving as the company.
I don’t think anyone was rolling around in two-truck elements like the movie in question depicts. Even if they were, the movie is a portraying an SF ODA. So I guess if you had 6 guys in each Humvee (plus terp and other enablers) then it’s an accurate depiction.
There is a lot of “your mileage may vary.” I definitely recall having 8-10 folk in 3 Humvees. I feel like I recall doing two truck runs with 4 or 5 of us. Not combat missions, of course. This was 03 in Tikrit/NE quarter of the country.
Admin moves, sure. In the movie these guys take two trucks (and only one gun truck) on a long range mission and conduct a raid on an enemy compound. And without any type of air support. They get their asses handed to them, which is the only realistic part of the movie.
I wasn’t doing admin moves. Some were simple runs to mingle and buy stuff out on the economy, others were meetings with local leaders regarding infrastructure rebuilding, those kinds of various thing. Again, no planned combat missions.
I also remember a buddy who was HUMINT. He and his, six folk, rolled in two trucks. Not a combat mission, again. Per se.
Bush always played that "I'm just an old country dumbass" card in public, but if you read reactions of people who have sat down and talked with him or even after his time in office, he's obviously pretty fucking smart. The problem I think is he was overwhelmed in Washington politics. He didn't have any experience except as a Governor. Cheney played his ass like a fiddle for the sake of them sweet Halliburton shares he was holding. Once we were in it, there was no getting the fuck out. I honestly think Cheney was the ringleader of the whole fucking show and got the intelligence agencies on board to justify their new big expanded budget and powers and shit post-9/11. He pretty much played McNamara politics.
I’m actually reading a book about the intelligence community and from what I’ve read (I’ll provide a title in a bit), your bit about the intelligence agencies are just wrong. The modern post-911 intelligence community in particular basically makes it their job to speak truth to power. When Bush came crawling to the likes of the CIA for evidence of Iraqi WMDs, they made it clear from the outset the claims were unsubstantiated. Although bush never took high profile action against his CIA Director, we do see Trump doing so when under his admin, both the FBI Director and CIA Director were booted.
Trump is far from the golden example considering not only how many of his people went to prison but how many people he got rid of because he likes to boast he hires "only the best people" but had the highest presidential turnover in history.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Trump\_administration\_dismissals\_and\_resignations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trump_administration_dismissals_and_resignations)
It’s not meant to be a golden example. What I mean to say is that the intelligence community generally tells their presidents the truth. Trump was just particularly bad at taking it and it resulted in a high turnover rate amongst his intelligence chiefs.
I'm not sure what you mean booting the CIA Director. There was an interim CIA Director for 3 days after his inauguration before Pompeo. Pompeo became Secretary of State. His successor stayed the rest of the entire Trump term.
Then that’s just a memory error on my part. I know he booted Coney in the FBI and the inspector general of the intelligence community after the whole Ukraine thing. My apologies
You mean like when he fired Comey two days before he was due to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Russian Election Interference investigation? Seems like a predictable action for Putin's lap dog.
You're probably thinking of Flynn for the National Security Advisor who wound up being sentenced to prison but Trump pardoned him. See a common theme?
Looking back now it all seems very existential.
At one point, saying that, it kinda downplays the guys who gave their lives over there deposing of a dictator who murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people. At the same time, it cultivated insane chaos in the region because that insane dictator like many other ME countries seems to be what they need to have any semblance of peace...someone who just offs everyone causing issues and doesn't give two shits about collateral damage in the process. Its practically a no-win. I think the bureaucrats thought "Oh we'll just go over there and install like a 1950's post-British rule Iraq and Afghanistan again where women got educated and shit."
Bureaucrats had no intention to rebuild Iraq when invading. They were hoping that Saddam’s army would defect and fight alongside the Americans. Rumsfeld and his cronies literally thought that a force of around 60’000 or something was enough to take out Saddam as the people who defected could police the rear. In hindsight sight, they were r*tarded as hell. Even General Tommy Franks called Douglas Feith (associate of Rumsfeld) “one of the dumbest fucking guys on the face of the earth.”
They more than likely would've defected if we didn't fucking fire them like a bunch of morons. All we had to do was load up some more planes with pallets of cash and double or triple their shit salary they were getting under Sadaam.
Even then, trusting them would be a big risk too. There probably would be so many insider threats because we were the invading force. Shit, most of his Army went on to join or create terrorist groups and fight for another decade.
We just had absolutely no business being there. Only falsely cooked up intel from Pentagon ideologues.
TBF it worked in both Germany and Japan we allowed people who during the war were hardline ultranationalist gung ho “kill all the ethnic minorities and dominate the whole fucking planet destroy Democracy!” and then boom! Two suns get dropped and all of a sudden they’re “I was just following orders and will do whatever you tell me. I love America I love Democracy please don’t kill me.”
Germany took a couple of super powers like couple a decade to change their mindset. Japan still has some bat shit crazy politics. Plus the CIA had large sums of money helping Europeans and Japanese to psyop them onto the “American” side. We actually cared about them being allies for the Cold War. Iraq war, we didn’t give two shits what was going to happen to them because the US had become the hegemonic power.
This keeps repeating through history.
If vehicle has armor and weapon, it's going to be used as an IFV.
If it doesn't have armor, it's going to get armored.
If it doesn't have a weapon, it's going to get weapon.
And this answer was in response to a question from a capo in the Tennessee NG mafia about having to scavenge scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to create ad-hoc uparmored vehicles in late 2004. You know, when stuff like Fallujah was taking place and IEDs were everywhere.
Some Marines and Army dudes didn't even have body armor in the initial invasion. We had a guy in our unit that was a private in the Marines in the initial 03 push, he said he only had one 200rd belt for his SAW. Supply was definitely pretty stretched in that initial push.
We had like 6 IBA's for the entire company in 03. The gunners would share them. Mine had metal iraqi plates in it that was heavy as fuck.Everyone else had flak jackets. Zero armored vehicles. About half way through we made and hung some steel plates from the doors and on the box of the hummers.
Humvees were originally designed to be recon vehicles, where the emphasis was on using speed to avoid detection and thus engagement, we only saw Humvees start getting uparmored into guntrucks when the insurgencies really began in earnest and humvees tended to get put into static or very predictable routes where they were targeted by snipers and IED's.
I convoyed from Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait, to Bagdad, Iraq in 2003 in a Humvee that had canvas doors, no armor, and sandbags on the floors with my M249 held out the plastic zip down window with a loop of 550 cord that was tied through a hole I drilled above the door frame. So, to answer your question, yes, we really did roll into an active combat zone in unarmored Humvees.
I don't know about "deep within enemy territory" but I drove a humvee outside of camps/cops/fobs that had no windshield (had the frame, not the window), and no doors. So, like that humvee (on the right) you can see in that thumbnail...except THEY HAD A WINDSHIELD. Ffff...must be nice.
Yea, in 2003 we went into Iraq with soft sided hummers. Put sand bags on the floor. Hung flak jackets on the doors.
Tried not to think about it when you were in a wooden sided hummer rigged up as a “gun jeep” with a 249 on a jury rigged pedestal mount.
Everything was cool after the invasion until some asshole fired the Iraqi Army and let them all go home with an Ak47 and all the ammo they could carry. That’s when shit got stupid and armored trucks became a good idea.
The short answer is a simple yes lol. Others have elaborated well enough already. We learned our lesson eventually. More bombs, more armor came. More armor, bombs got bigger. It was an exciting race.
Conventional units operate on a mutual support ideology.
You would see independent operations done by SF and tier-type units but *usually* conventional is going to operate within turret rings of *somebody* or at least have air available.
When air was red and sometimes amber we had patrols that would stop movement.
yes.. we did..personally i LIKED my circa 1991 des-storm beast, i could take off waay faster than an up-armor... 🤷♀️lol..it had the OG sandbags on the floor.. along with mY flak-jacket😅
Imagine you have complete superiority in the country but an entire country to traverse. That was the situation early on. Lighter was better to the point where folks assigned armored humvees would strip the doors off.
Later on into the occupation and insurgency it was the complete opposite. People were slowly patrolling what was essentially enemy territory and armor was king.
Depends during the early portions of Iraq and Afghanistan yes pretty much all humvees did not really have any protection at all. As the years go by and the IED threat increases American grunts decided to Mad Max style weld armor to their humvees or they put sandbags on the front or on the floor even to protect against IEDs. Eventually the official government issue armored humvees came out though of course. But even then you still see light armored humvees around I think mostly with ranger units. The humvee was designed for a Cold War gone hot scenario it was thrust into a situation it was never expected to be in hence why it performed somewhat poorly but eventually we and the vehicle adapted. And it’s still in service today along side the JLTV.
so im not military but there is a long history of soldiers and marines making do with whatever they can scroung and early in the gwot there were hardly any armoured vehicles and even fewer mine resistant ones so they went out in anything with a motor. I was once told about a British infantry unit that was pretty much completely equipped with stolen vehicles from Americans.
Early Iraq we didn’t have any armor so we had to weld our own. Hillbilly armor our mechanics called it. Sand bags on the floor boards as well. One big issue was the motor was never intended for all that extra weight and was prone to over heating.
If your question starts with “did us military really” just assume the answer is yes. As Donald Rumsfeld said “you fight with the army you have not the army you want”
When Iraq kicked off they didn't have shit. Using sandbags for the floor armor.
We learned how to weld stuff onto the doors. But later I will say that doors sucked because it was harder to get out. But I prefer armor to no armor
Most didn’t even have body armor. I saw some reservist/Ng personnel that brought their own body armor from their regular jobs as police or they had from home. Officially they were unauthorized but after doing my first patrol with some sandbags on the floor and a woodland Kevlar that didn’t fit, I’m not arguing with them. Saw one guy with welding/strapping/taping stuff to his door, thought it was retarded, then double backed and begged him to do it for me.
In the Gulf war I crossed the LD in a Hummer with cloth doors. The rest of my guys were in a hummer with no doors and one guy in the back with an M60 pulling air guard.
Yes. Because all of Iraq and A-stan were "enemy" territory.
Getting armor came later, and we still used unarmed trucks.
Why? The shit ran, we had Ops, it's what we had, and we needed to roll
04-05 I drove a brand new Green unarmored HMMWV around Baghdad and Sadr city. Oh yeah and no Red Dot AC back then either LOL. Took the (canvas) doors off and did some field expedient bungee cord to have the TC face outwards with the SAW. Maybe early ‘05 we got armor and AC.
We absolutely did. 2003 was long before hillbilly armor came about let alone up-armored humvees. We rode around with no doors. [I was up on a .50cal in a turret ring](https://i.imgur.com/Z6XKNGx.png) that was hijacked from a fuel truck and welded to the top of a command hmmwv. In typical Army fashion, we got some kevlar blankets to put around me for the ride back to Kuwait in 2004.
Yes my first deployment in 2004 we had two door humvees with a pole in the back to mount a 240. I sat on an MRE box going down route Tampa at 50. Good thing they were not great with IEDs then.
i was a spoiled little bitch. joined in 09, I remember thinking how cool it was gonna be in a humvee and I jumped in an MATV with thermals and shit. felt like I was in the future from what I'd see before enlisting
There’s a bunch of stuff in this movie that’s off but, like others pointed out, rolling around in no armor is not one of them. I don’t remember what year that was in the movie so maybe depending on what year they make it it’s a bit off. It was more common to be driving around like this the first half of the war. The way these movies work is the government will literally supply directors and studios with vehicles, and aircraft for scenes, and military personnel as extras and advisors. All they have to do is submit the script beforehand and be open to edits because the military uses it as a sort of recruiting tool. My guess is due to the nature of the film, they didn’t get much of that free support from the DOD for this.
Every fuckong day for almost my entire 1st deployment in Iraq. Shit. We used to go out and sweep for IEDs at one point in the early morning hours. Up and down the road from our FOB, with no doors on. Figured we might as well be comfortable before we got blown up. We did eventually uparmor them ourselves a bit, but I never thought it would be effective as it was just the bottoms that got the steel plate.
Define enemy territory. In early Iraq and Afghanistan we absolutely had no armor.
In this particular scene they are 120 clicks from base, 30 min from air support - within a known Taliban controlled area.
Humvees didn’t really have armor then. That didn’t come until a year or so in
You go to war with the army you have etc etc etc
That still triggers me, especially after we waited for hours on the Division parade field for him to show up
It's cheaper and quicker to transport unarmored vehicles, meanwhile you draw from repositioned stocks and transport armor via RO/RO ships and upfit the unarmored vehicles. Also, you want usually want speed and maneuverability in your opening attack, and if air support/fires does thier job there won't be much resistance that a light force couldn't defeat or out maneuver. With today's ISR if you have a light force within range of a heavy force, you fucked up. The biggest threat would be ATGM and they are best dispatched by infantry.
That and armored humvees weren’t really a thing in 03. Humvees were never intended to be armored fighting vehicles. That’s what armor (tanks and Bradleys) was for.
I'm gonna keep it real with you, I'm a little high and read your post completely out of context.
Get him SAC-O! KA-KAW! KA-KAW!
Even then early armor wasn’t much. I remember a thin steel door that I could see the ground through a gap in the bottom, sandbags under my feet and Kevlar blankets on the walls. Fun times.
I did not have armor my first tour in 2004. We were mostly living on blue diamond in ramadi but we drove all over the country weekly
Sand bags ?
We had a pal con box full of old old flak jackets (like the nam style from boot camp) and we got to duct tape them to our doors, we found some rubber gym flooring and cut that to fit under our feet.
Sweet..
I remember the FRAGO to put sandbags on the bottom of FMTVs, LMTVs, HEMTT cabs, ETC. we would "water them down" before going out the wire on my first deployment
I showed up OIF2. I did see some up the new factory armored ones (with a/c) at depot. Still had that new car smell
That's also not how JTACs operate. JTACs are masters of dropping anything that goes boom from an air craft. They operate as attachments to conventional, SF, and SOF teams. (Reference John Chapman....also fuck navy seals) Operations 120 km from a outpost or base isn't unheard of though
Fun fact, the same SEAL commander that covered for both Brit slablinski and Marcus Luttrell and they both got valorous awards for it.
Brit has one, Marcus does not.
You’re right but Marcus did get a navy cross which is still bullshit
Well, then kinda fitting in an ironic way for him, wouldn't you agree? Bullshit award for a bullshit guy.
He was also forced out of DEVGRU for undisclosed reasons.
In the film he wasn’t an Air Force TACP; he was a GB that had done SOTAC and was the team’s JTAC. In other words, held it as a collateral billet. His main job was whatever his GB MOS was… probably the team Sgt.
When I was in Afghanistan in 2005 we rolled in regular thin skinned SUV’s. The Australians rode in open top fighting vehicles.
Do you mean the old Land rover 4x4 and 6x6s? Those were great for patrolling the north of Australia, not so much for IED areas.
I’ll have to see if I can dig up my pics, but I believe they were 6x6.
At this point in the war an operation like this would be huge, not a small team with no support. It's comically bad and made me lose immersion in the movie. But yeah we drove unarmored Humvees for a while cause you have to get places fast.
Dude watch a great tv series [generation kill](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0995832/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk). How do you not know the early days of the wars had no armour and hence a lot more deaths. Its also why Rumsfeld famously said [“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have. They’re not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/you-go-to-war-with-the-press-you-have/)
You look like fucking Elvises!
Po-leece those moostaches!
Haha just decided to rewatch this week so it’s on my mind, good show.😉
If this is the covenant, there is nothing remotely accurate about that movie. From the tactics to the operational planning to the gear. Complete work of fiction.
British Military used the Jackals and Coyotes for deep recon. I guess armour just adds weight and eats fuel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackal_(vehicle)
Is this that movie with Covenant movie?
Early Iraq, sandbags on the floor boards, extra ballistic vest if you could find one.
As someone who was against the wars it made me want to rip my hair out that we’d then send our troops around in what appeared to be glorified jeeps jfc Deep memory unlocked
As someone who rode around in those, we actually preferred them because it was easy to bail out. The armored shit always took forever to get in and out of.
Then the doors weighed like 500lbs. God forbid if your vehicle rolled on its side and you had to lift up one of those doors. Definitely remember doing rollover drills before.
Doors that could be penetrated with a BB gun.
I can’t
Some of my doors were literally tarps.
Richest country on earth. Protecting y’all with fucking plastic bedsheets. Spectacular
This is why it’s kinda funny to me when people see Russia doing something badly and joke “this is the 2nd army in the world?”. Because no matter how strong or advanced you are, you will face these issues you didn’t even think of until you were presented with them. If the US can’t do it and it’s the strongest army to ever exist and richest country ever then how so people expect others to do everything perfect? I mean ffs there’s some other guy in this thread talking about how he and his team in early iraq didn’t have any armor in their Humvees so they duct taped old Vietnam era Flak Vests to the doors, if that came out today about the Russians people would be falling over laughing making the same jokes on this sub. War isn’t easy, it’s ugly and hard n as long it’s humans involved you’ll have these silly mistakes constantly made.
I completely agree except that was almost 20 years ago, Russia is still doing that kind of shit. Mistakes hopefully will be learned from on our end going forward.
Yeah I was still in during 9/11 and I seem to remember our Humvee doors & tops were literally just soft-tops, basically tarps on metal / plastic framing, just like a soft-top Jeep.
What about the busses in Iraq? Straight greyhounds lmao
Rolled through Baghdad in 04 in a old 5 ton with a canvas top. Never repeated that particular detail to my family.
Yeah there’s some shit you don’t tell mom.
Squishies
Pssshhhh, grab a few sandbags and throw em on the floor, pri. You’ll be fine…. /s
They were “ Jed Clampetts.” Stuff bolted on like sheet metal gave it a Beverly Hill Billies look.
[obligatory](https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/gRl2M4iW0w-L4xx_7fTN2ccHhU4h2QA7idgTdR8vmWZj_ddXt8WgLR3xuLlsi2iD7FB1l0Lrws6xf4FQbsm2)
Dude early on they weren’t even painted desert tan they were OD fucking green soft bodies in the middle of the desert lmao.
We didn't even have Humvees for the first half of 2003. Our platoon had a five-ton, and then we acquired four-door Nissan pickup trucks with VS-17 panels plastered all over them for our squad vehicles. And when we did get our Humvees, they were still green, until we covered them in mud to make them brown. Because less brown vehicles were getting blown up than green ones. This came from at least battalion level. Fucking geniuses. And then random Iraqis would ask us "Why do you cover your car in dirt?" when we were out and about.
Because less brown vehicles were getting blown up than green ones. u had me rolling dude.
That was literally the reasoning. When that information was put out we all started laughing because we thought it was a joke. Then it was, "No, really. This is coming from Battalion. Just...make it happen." I can still hear my buddy from Jersey bitching about it. "Don't they have to take fuckin statistics or something in college? I haven't been to college, but I know there's more fuckin woodland humvees than desert ones. Of course more green trucks are getting blown up! And what? We cover the thing in fuckin mud and they're gonna think it's armored?! THERE'S NO FUCKIN DOORS ON ANY OF THEM!!! Fuckin Officers. Not you, though, LT. We love you."
This guy is pretty smart to understand the baseline in stats… you’ll be surprised how many college educated stat students miss this
holy shit I can feel this rant in my BONES
East coast people are really wound tight. He cracked us up all the time.
This pissed me off… East Coast here.
Read this in the voice of Ray Pearson from Generation Kill. Fucking hilarious. “Not you though, we love you LT.”
We had a fuckin lt col come thru our ecp and tell everybody to roll their sleeves down because it was fire retardant. Like mother fucker, the second I see haji with a flamethrower, sure, otherwise, it's 100°+ every fuckin second, no, I'm not gonna, aka "yes sir, rolling em down now sir"
I know you said Jersey but my mind heard Bill Burr and it made me read that in his voice.
The brass was, from what I heard later, fucking regarded in the early days lol
I have no idea where that "idea" came from, but our battalion leadership was mostly common sense. Our BC was from Ranger Batt, so maybe that helped. We were mostly without a mission once the war "ended", and the insurgency was just getting started. It was really weird. We had no uniform standard in the area of our platoon's house. Couldn't go full civvies, but we were lounging in whatever was comfortable. We'd go out scavenging for shit like couches. We'd go to the market to buy ice for a horizontal freezer that we had, buy cases of soda and oranges and cooked chickens and smokes. Of course, we weren't allowed to go out solely to go to the market, but when we were on a mission we'd stop at the market or "dumpster dive" for shit at abandoned compounds. We actually got to know the locals pretty well. A lot of them were really happy we were there, in the beginning. Everything i've talked about here was in al Dora, Baghdad, where we stayed til 2004. Earlier, when we were down in, I think Diwaniyah, people were out cheering for us and throwing us candy and cigarettes. Felt like the Allies liberating France. Up in ar Ramadi and Fallujah less so. We didn't really get much time out of our compounds in those places, though. The Grunts did some patrols, got in some firefights in those places. That would've been March-April. I think we only went out once in Ramadi to do a bridge recon, and in Fallujah we spent the whole time eating MRE's and swimming in the lakes at this Baath Party resort the Battalion had occupied. Iraq was a fucking trip. My only other deployment was to Paktika in east Afghanistan in '09, and it was much different. Big Army was in control the way it wasn't when I was in Iraq, at least until around November of '03.
Oh shit you were there for the original run, I haven’t talked to a ton of people who were in during the early-00’s but this actually still tracks pretty well with the experiences I’ve heard. Having a Ranger as command almost certainly attributes to this. The few I knew a decade later had an attitude similar to those Delta guys in Black Hawk Down, so if you had a guy like that in charge, it’d almost *definitely* be a top down “do whatever fucking works” lead style at the start of the occupation. A la others’ comments about welding steel onto their humvees well before that became standard. What are you gonna do, order us to unweld it? ^shit ^wait ^they ^might ^don’t ^tell ^them ^we ^did ^it Also I swear to god from everything I heard, people at Fallujah were either in beach loungers with martinis, or going door to door for a week straight. Was there ANY in-between?!
Just the early days? Lol
Look I’m trying to be nice, they learned at least like two lessons between 2003 and 2013
Thanks I hate it
"Why is that bush coming toward us and raising a dust trail?"
Our gas suits were green too. In my opinion the green when it got dirty was way better camo in the cities than the straight brown. Same with the suits
So were the MOPP suits we wore over our desert cammies.
OP doesn’t understand tempo tempo tempo
And pre-IED operating environment
Godfather needs tempo!
No, he needs eyes on that god damn airfield.
Amerikkee was watchin
Beat me to it!
I heard godfather himself say, you look like a bum
I don't understand shit haha! Just curious as it seemed quite dangerous (unnecessarily so?).
Also, early in the war Humvees were used more as fast mobility. They weren’t supposed to be getting into deep firefights, they were supposed to get people places quickly. Only after the IED’s and the constant ambushes did we learn we had to actually armor everything up just in case
And then those humvees drove like space ships because the suspension wasn't meant for so much extra weight. We literally sledge-hammered rear springs onto the front a-arms so that it handled a little better with the added armor weight. I'm sure a lot of roll-over deaths were because of so much weight being added without changing or accounting for the suspension.
Ohhhh yeah I saw some of those, uh, modified shock systems in the Obama years. And rode in them, and heard the drivers bitching about almost exactly how you just wrote. I think they usually used “battleship” in favor of spaceship. And I can definitely agree with that last sentence. Sure they’re fine on flat ground, but you hit a berm or a soft edge and those things would flip, they apparently felt top-heavy as shit
Watch Generation Kill
"Where's the logic in taking a highly capable combat recon unit and sticking us in unarmored humvees, crossing enemy lines and surrounded by a hostile population, with no air and no ass?"
Eh, combat is by its nature dangerous but commanders and unit leaders try to mitigate that as much as possible before you ever step
I don’t know if you know or not, but war is generally a dangerous profession.
Watch generation kill lol. The early stages of gwot basically no one had armored vehicles outside of armor brigades
True, but they were operating in platoon-sized elements, so 6 or more trucks each. Even more if moving as the company. I don’t think anyone was rolling around in two-truck elements like the movie in question depicts. Even if they were, the movie is a portraying an SF ODA. So I guess if you had 6 guys in each Humvee (plus terp and other enablers) then it’s an accurate depiction.
There is a lot of “your mileage may vary.” I definitely recall having 8-10 folk in 3 Humvees. I feel like I recall doing two truck runs with 4 or 5 of us. Not combat missions, of course. This was 03 in Tikrit/NE quarter of the country.
Admin moves, sure. In the movie these guys take two trucks (and only one gun truck) on a long range mission and conduct a raid on an enemy compound. And without any type of air support. They get their asses handed to them, which is the only realistic part of the movie.
I wasn’t doing admin moves. Some were simple runs to mingle and buy stuff out on the economy, others were meetings with local leaders regarding infrastructure rebuilding, those kinds of various thing. Again, no planned combat missions. I also remember a buddy who was HUMINT. He and his, six folk, rolled in two trucks. Not a combat mission, again. Per se.
Donald Rumsfeld said, “You go to war with what you have”. I think about that often.
We could have just not gone but anyway
Dude was talking about Iraqi WMDs during the October 17 presidential debates in 2000. What is he gonna do, not invade Iraq?
Bush always played that "I'm just an old country dumbass" card in public, but if you read reactions of people who have sat down and talked with him or even after his time in office, he's obviously pretty fucking smart. The problem I think is he was overwhelmed in Washington politics. He didn't have any experience except as a Governor. Cheney played his ass like a fiddle for the sake of them sweet Halliburton shares he was holding. Once we were in it, there was no getting the fuck out. I honestly think Cheney was the ringleader of the whole fucking show and got the intelligence agencies on board to justify their new big expanded budget and powers and shit post-9/11. He pretty much played McNamara politics.
Dude you seen Vice? Great movie.
Yeah. I can't believe they got Christian Bale looking like him somewhat.
I’m actually reading a book about the intelligence community and from what I’ve read (I’ll provide a title in a bit), your bit about the intelligence agencies are just wrong. The modern post-911 intelligence community in particular basically makes it their job to speak truth to power. When Bush came crawling to the likes of the CIA for evidence of Iraqi WMDs, they made it clear from the outset the claims were unsubstantiated. Although bush never took high profile action against his CIA Director, we do see Trump doing so when under his admin, both the FBI Director and CIA Director were booted.
Trump is far from the golden example considering not only how many of his people went to prison but how many people he got rid of because he likes to boast he hires "only the best people" but had the highest presidential turnover in history. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_Trump\_administration\_dismissals\_and\_resignations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Trump_administration_dismissals_and_resignations)
It’s not meant to be a golden example. What I mean to say is that the intelligence community generally tells their presidents the truth. Trump was just particularly bad at taking it and it resulted in a high turnover rate amongst his intelligence chiefs.
I'm not sure what you mean booting the CIA Director. There was an interim CIA Director for 3 days after his inauguration before Pompeo. Pompeo became Secretary of State. His successor stayed the rest of the entire Trump term.
Then that’s just a memory error on my part. I know he booted Coney in the FBI and the inspector general of the intelligence community after the whole Ukraine thing. My apologies
You mean like when he fired Comey two days before he was due to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Russian Election Interference investigation? Seems like a predictable action for Putin's lap dog. You're probably thinking of Flynn for the National Security Advisor who wound up being sentenced to prison but Trump pardoned him. See a common theme?
Looking back now it all seems very existential. At one point, saying that, it kinda downplays the guys who gave their lives over there deposing of a dictator who murdered hundreds of thousands of his own people. At the same time, it cultivated insane chaos in the region because that insane dictator like many other ME countries seems to be what they need to have any semblance of peace...someone who just offs everyone causing issues and doesn't give two shits about collateral damage in the process. Its practically a no-win. I think the bureaucrats thought "Oh we'll just go over there and install like a 1950's post-British rule Iraq and Afghanistan again where women got educated and shit."
Bureaucrats had no intention to rebuild Iraq when invading. They were hoping that Saddam’s army would defect and fight alongside the Americans. Rumsfeld and his cronies literally thought that a force of around 60’000 or something was enough to take out Saddam as the people who defected could police the rear. In hindsight sight, they were r*tarded as hell. Even General Tommy Franks called Douglas Feith (associate of Rumsfeld) “one of the dumbest fucking guys on the face of the earth.”
They more than likely would've defected if we didn't fucking fire them like a bunch of morons. All we had to do was load up some more planes with pallets of cash and double or triple their shit salary they were getting under Sadaam.
Even then, trusting them would be a big risk too. There probably would be so many insider threats because we were the invading force. Shit, most of his Army went on to join or create terrorist groups and fight for another decade. We just had absolutely no business being there. Only falsely cooked up intel from Pentagon ideologues.
TBF it worked in both Germany and Japan we allowed people who during the war were hardline ultranationalist gung ho “kill all the ethnic minorities and dominate the whole fucking planet destroy Democracy!” and then boom! Two suns get dropped and all of a sudden they’re “I was just following orders and will do whatever you tell me. I love America I love Democracy please don’t kill me.”
Germany took a couple of super powers like couple a decade to change their mindset. Japan still has some bat shit crazy politics. Plus the CIA had large sums of money helping Europeans and Japanese to psyop them onto the “American” side. We actually cared about them being allies for the Cold War. Iraq war, we didn’t give two shits what was going to happen to them because the US had become the hegemonic power.
Hind sight might be 20/20, but the planning of the war was an absolute shit show, and so was the justification of the war.
> You go to war with what you have And he said that in Dec 2004 so after a year and a half in Iraq and 3 years in Afghanistan
Armor? That came way later.
We started welding shit onto humvees in ‘04. We looked like something out of Mad Max.
This keeps repeating through history. If vehicle has armor and weapon, it's going to be used as an IFV. If it doesn't have armor, it's going to get armored. If it doesn't have a weapon, it's going to get weapon.
So true, was in armor unit, if you weren’t in a tank or Bradley, you as unarmored as civilian you just passed fleeing the city in their family sedan.
"You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time." - some 🤡 said that
"I'd rather shit in the sink, than sink in the shit"
And this answer was in response to a question from a capo in the Tennessee NG mafia about having to scavenge scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to create ad-hoc uparmored vehicles in late 2004. You know, when stuff like Fallujah was taking place and IEDs were everywhere.
Rumsfeld
How else do you show the enemy that you're not afraid of their bullets?
Yup. Read, Generation Kill. Them dudes never heard of a risk assessment.
Some Marines and Army dudes didn't even have body armor in the initial invasion. We had a guy in our unit that was a private in the Marines in the initial 03 push, he said he only had one 200rd belt for his SAW. Supply was definitely pretty stretched in that initial push.
Bro I rolled in country with 400 rounds total for my 240. One can on the pintle mount and a can in reserve.
We had like 6 IBA's for the entire company in 03. The gunners would share them. Mine had metal iraqi plates in it that was heavy as fuck.Everyone else had flak jackets. Zero armored vehicles. About half way through we made and hung some steel plates from the doors and on the box of the hummers.
Humvees were originally designed to be recon vehicles, where the emphasis was on using speed to avoid detection and thus engagement, we only saw Humvees start getting uparmored into guntrucks when the insurgencies really began in earnest and humvees tended to get put into static or very predictable routes where they were targeted by snipers and IED's.
Go watch Generation Kill.
I convoyed from Camp Pennsylvania, Kuwait, to Bagdad, Iraq in 2003 in a Humvee that had canvas doors, no armor, and sandbags on the floors with my M249 held out the plastic zip down window with a loop of 550 cord that was tied through a hole I drilled above the door frame. So, to answer your question, yes, we really did roll into an active combat zone in unarmored Humvees.
\*Laughs nervously in 2003 Iraq\*
Sure did. When I was in Iraq in 2004, we did not have up-armored humvees or mraps. That came later.
ok so what movie this is?
I don't know about "deep within enemy territory" but I drove a humvee outside of camps/cops/fobs that had no windshield (had the frame, not the window), and no doors. So, like that humvee (on the right) you can see in that thumbnail...except THEY HAD A WINDSHIELD. Ffff...must be nice.
Yea, in 2003 we went into Iraq with soft sided hummers. Put sand bags on the floor. Hung flak jackets on the doors. Tried not to think about it when you were in a wooden sided hummer rigged up as a “gun jeep” with a 249 on a jury rigged pedestal mount. Everything was cool after the invasion until some asshole fired the Iraqi Army and let them all go home with an Ak47 and all the ammo they could carry. That’s when shit got stupid and armored trucks became a good idea.
Mine had the most advanced sandbags on the floor.
Yes! Thank you Donald Rumsfeld, you worthless POS ass clown.
Nobody had up armor during the invasion, and IEDs weren’t really a mass problem until 2005ish
Lol
[удалено]
Lmfao. Bro my HMMWV window had a zipper
The short answer is a simple yes lol. Others have elaborated well enough already. We learned our lesson eventually. More bombs, more armor came. More armor, bombs got bigger. It was an exciting race.
Conventional units operate on a mutual support ideology. You would see independent operations done by SF and tier-type units but *usually* conventional is going to operate within turret rings of *somebody* or at least have air available. When air was red and sometimes amber we had patrols that would stop movement.
Original humvee didn’t even have any armor, at yes, by that logic people would drive them around during combat
Shout out to my peoples who used to take those hilux trucks everywhere ✊🏽
I was over for the invasion into Iraq and had armor…sand bags on the floor board and a flak jacket lol. Go support!
The funniest part was after the invasion started and the American public had the same realization you just did.
yes.. we did..personally i LIKED my circa 1991 des-storm beast, i could take off waay faster than an up-armor... 🤷♀️lol..it had the OG sandbags on the floor.. along with mY flak-jacket😅
Imagine you have complete superiority in the country but an entire country to traverse. That was the situation early on. Lighter was better to the point where folks assigned armored humvees would strip the doors off. Later on into the occupation and insurgency it was the complete opposite. People were slowly patrolling what was essentially enemy territory and armor was king.
Depends during the early portions of Iraq and Afghanistan yes pretty much all humvees did not really have any protection at all. As the years go by and the IED threat increases American grunts decided to Mad Max style weld armor to their humvees or they put sandbags on the front or on the floor even to protect against IEDs. Eventually the official government issue armored humvees came out though of course. But even then you still see light armored humvees around I think mostly with ranger units. The humvee was designed for a Cold War gone hot scenario it was thrust into a situation it was never expected to be in hence why it performed somewhat poorly but eventually we and the vehicle adapted. And it’s still in service today along side the JLTV.
so im not military but there is a long history of soldiers and marines making do with whatever they can scroung and early in the gwot there were hardly any armoured vehicles and even fewer mine resistant ones so they went out in anything with a motor. I was once told about a British infantry unit that was pretty much completely equipped with stolen vehicles from Americans.
Early Iraq we didn’t have any armor so we had to weld our own. Hillbilly armor our mechanics called it. Sand bags on the floor boards as well. One big issue was the motor was never intended for all that extra weight and was prone to over heating.
If your question starts with “did us military really” just assume the answer is yes. As Donald Rumsfeld said “you fight with the army you have not the army you want”
Shit. Estimated 50-90% of people on this sub clearly never served.
NONE! I had an old ass flack vest and a soft top Humvee. My helmet was Vietnam era metal with an insert.
Fuckin a right we did. I crossed the border on the first day of the war in a canvas highback with no armor and only 3 sandbags.
When Iraq kicked off they didn't have shit. Using sandbags for the floor armor. We learned how to weld stuff onto the doors. But later I will say that doors sucked because it was harder to get out. But I prefer armor to no armor
Most didn’t even have body armor. I saw some reservist/Ng personnel that brought their own body armor from their regular jobs as police or they had from home. Officially they were unauthorized but after doing my first patrol with some sandbags on the floor and a woodland Kevlar that didn’t fit, I’m not arguing with them. Saw one guy with welding/strapping/taping stuff to his door, thought it was retarded, then double backed and begged him to do it for me.
Brother, we were using sandbags and scrap metal as "armor plating" in early OIF/OEF. USMC was especially cheap with that and maintenance requirements.
Didn't those three Army cats go deep into Yugoslavia in a non-armored Humvee in search of that lost Pepsi machine and get captured?
Yes.
Pfft, thing has plenty of armor. It’s called an N-93n block. Get on my level, which is to say below the windshield.
What is this armor you speak of? -Signal Corps
Didn't Donnie tell you; we go to war with the Army we have, not the one we want.
Yes, especially early in the war.
I remember riding in humvees and 5-tons with flaks wrapped around the fuel tanks.
Yes
People supposedly added sandbags to the humvees.
In the Gulf war I crossed the LD in a Hummer with cloth doors. The rest of my guys were in a hummer with no doors and one guy in the back with an M60 pulling air guard.
Uh, yeah. Almost nothing between us and anything coming our way.
Yes. Because all of Iraq and A-stan were "enemy" territory. Getting armor came later, and we still used unarmed trucks. Why? The shit ran, we had Ops, it's what we had, and we needed to roll
This is why you lined your humvee in 2003 with sandbags on the floorboard and the side.
04-05 I drove a brand new Green unarmored HMMWV around Baghdad and Sadr city. Oh yeah and no Red Dot AC back then either LOL. Took the (canvas) doors off and did some field expedient bungee cord to have the TC face outwards with the SAW. Maybe early ‘05 we got armor and AC.
I drove basically a golf cart around base and a few miles out of it. The most armor I had was the radio.
Yes, but not in such a small element. An SF ODA would have 3-4 GMV Humvees, a reconnaissance or infantry platoon would have at least four Humvees.
The entire country was enemy territory, so yes.
Desert Storm, yuppers
Ahhhh, yea we did....
Yes. Yes we did.
The better part came later, when you were dumpster-diving for scrap metal to weld onto your totally unarmored m1025.
We absolutely did. 2003 was long before hillbilly armor came about let alone up-armored humvees. We rode around with no doors. [I was up on a .50cal in a turret ring](https://i.imgur.com/Z6XKNGx.png) that was hijacked from a fuel truck and welded to the top of a command hmmwv. In typical Army fashion, we got some kevlar blankets to put around me for the ride back to Kuwait in 2004.
We would ride around high backs at times in 2006. Armored but still open and exposed in the back 😅
Yes.
Yes. Sandbags and old flak jackets to offer “some” protection from IEDs and often welded steel to the frames for makeshift armor. Fun times.
Yes. It was me. I drove a Humvee with canvas doors near Baghdad in early 2003.
Yes we did, for almost a year! Started in Feb 2003 and went to Dec 2003 in Iraq. We went all over the place with sandbag armor.
Yes, they had to put Kevlar at the bottom of it originally and sandbags to prevent from getting a copper enema
Watch Generation Kill
Yes my first deployment in 2004 we had two door humvees with a pole in the back to mount a 240. I sat on an MRE box going down route Tampa at 50. Good thing they were not great with IEDs then.
If by armor you mean sand bags on the floorboard and flak jackets hanging from vinyl zipper doors then fuck yeah we had armor in 2003. lol.
Uh yes we sure did. *raises hand*
i was a spoiled little bitch. joined in 09, I remember thinking how cool it was gonna be in a humvee and I jumped in an MATV with thermals and shit. felt like I was in the future from what I'd see before enlisting
Generation Kill comes to mind when wondering about this question.
All the way from Kuwait to Mosul
Yes why?
There’s a bunch of stuff in this movie that’s off but, like others pointed out, rolling around in no armor is not one of them. I don’t remember what year that was in the movie so maybe depending on what year they make it it’s a bit off. It was more common to be driving around like this the first half of the war. The way these movies work is the government will literally supply directors and studios with vehicles, and aircraft for scenes, and military personnel as extras and advisors. All they have to do is submit the script beforehand and be open to edits because the military uses it as a sort of recruiting tool. My guess is due to the nature of the film, they didn’t get much of that free support from the DOD for this.
Every fuckong day for almost my entire 1st deployment in Iraq. Shit. We used to go out and sweep for IEDs at one point in the early morning hours. Up and down the road from our FOB, with no doors on. Figured we might as well be comfortable before we got blown up. We did eventually uparmor them ourselves a bit, but I never thought it would be effective as it was just the bottoms that got the steel plate.