Improvised vehicle armour
Typically, improvised armour is added in the field and it was not originally part of the design, an official up-armour kit, nor centrally planned and distributed.
Improvised armour is used to protect occupants from small arms, crew-served weapons, artillery (or tank gun) fire, and mines.
[1] The British Royal Naval Air Service in Dunkirk sent teams in cars to find and rescue downed reconnaissance pilots in the battle areas.
They mounted machine guns on them[2] and as these excursions became increasingly dangerous, they improvised boiler plate armouring on the vehicles using metal provided by a local shipbuilder.
[citation needed] Most armies involved in World War II adopted some form of improvised armour at some point.
[3] US M8 Greyhound armoured car crews would sometimes line the floors of their vehicles with sandbags to provide extra protection against landmines.
Some German improvised armour was designed to protect weak points, such as sandbags added by Afrika Korps tank crews to the turret joint.
During the 1984 UK miners' strike, buses used for transporting strikebreakers to work were armoured against attacks by strikers by fitting metal bars to their windows.
[10] During the occupation that followed the 2003 invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's regime, insurgent forces deployed roadside bombs, RPG teams, and snipers with small arms to attack military vehicles on supply convoys and other known routes.
[11] To protect themselves from these threats, American troops began reinforcing their Humvees, LMTVs and other vehicles with whatever was available, including scrap metal, kevlar blankets and vests, compromised ballistic glass and plywood.
The machine used in the incident was a modified Komatsu D355A bulldozer,[17] fitted with makeshift armour plating covering the cabin, engine, and parts of the tracks.
[21] Wilson: "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armour our vehicles?
You can have all the armour in the world on a tank and (still) be blown up..."Rumsfeld was paying a visit to approximately 2,300 troops on the eve of their deployment across the border to Iraq.
[12] On 10 December 2004, it was reported that following the incident, Armor Holdings, Inc., the company producing armoured Humvees for the Army, was asked to increase production from 450 to 550 per month—its maximum capacity.
[27] Also on 10 December, Congressman Marty Meehan (D-MA, House Armed Services Committee) issued a news release harshly critical of the Bush administration and The Pentagon: Meehan described the shortage of armoured vehicles as "a dangerously exposed center of gravity" of America's military presence in Iraq, and the lack of preparedness for insurgent tactics such as deploying improvised explosive devices (IEDs) as "symptomatic of a headlong rush to war.
Gen. Jeff Sorenson, Deputy for Acquisition Systems Management, stated during the briefing that fully armoured vehicles had been isolated and destroyed in the former Soviet Union's campaigns in Afghanistan and Chechnya, and that the hearts and minds aspect of the Army's counterinsurgency efforts would be negatively impacted were soldiers to remain isolated from the populace in fully armoured vehicles.
[35] In 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine where it saw combat usage, it was pejoratively referred to as "emotional support armour" or "cope cages"[36][37][38][39][40] among online communities, as an expression of skepticism over their effectiveness.
Military analysts have suggested that the armour was most likely designed in an attempt to mitigate the threat of top-attack weapons such as the FGM-148 Javelin, alternatively against RPGs fired from above in cities, loitering munitions and drone attacks.
[47] Improvised armour has also been employed by the Ukrainian army, and has been observed repeatedly in the battlefield on howitzers, IFVs, tanks and foreign-donated equipment.
Many of the improvised vehicles were converted tractors and farm equipment fitted with Soviet-era guns, some with elaborate paint schemes and designs.
