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Add-on armor provides added protection to 2nd BCT Soldiers Staff Sgt. Leonard Bergantzel, a track mechanic for the 286th Ordnance Company, uses a blow torch to fabricate a piece of side armor inside the maintenance support team's workshop on Kirkuk Air Base Aug. 18. The side armor will be used to protect Soldiers situated in the rear of cargo HMMWVs. (Photo by Spc. Sean Kimmons, 25th ID (L) PAO) KIRKUK AIR BASE, Iraq – In order to prevent injuries or deaths due to small arms fire and improvised explosive devices, add-on armor kits are being installed onto many 2nd...

Since March, 2003, army mechanics in Iraq and Kuwait have installed 8,000 armor kits, 2,000 aid conditioners and 4,500 bulletproof windshields in trucks and hummers. The units that do this work are sometimes called “Mad Max Shops” (after the armored vehicles in the Mel Gibson movie of the same name.) The mechanics also do all sorts of modifications, many of them experimental (some work, some don’t). The Mad Max Shops work at night, as the metal becomes too hot to pick up and handle by day. The preferred material for armoring vehicles is a Swedish steel/nickel/chromium alloy called Hardox 400....

Friday, August 20, 2004 2nd ID vehicles are upgraded to survive rough traveling in Iraq By Seth Robson, Stars and StripesEuropean edition, Friday, August 20, 2004 Seth Robson / S&S A 2nd Infantry Division Humvee from South Korea has new armored doors and windows and an air conditioner unit installed at Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. Seth Robson / S&S Pfc. Mark Greene of the 699th Maintenance Company, 21, of North Carolina works on an armored door at the Camp Buehring "Mad Max" shop. CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait — Soft-shelled 2nd Infantry Division vehicles are getting a Middle East makeover that includes armor,...

The U.S. Army fielded the HMMWV (or “Humvee,” as we call it) in 1983. At that time, the Humvee represented the pinnacle of automotive technology. Over the last 21 years however, the Humvee has begun to grow long in the tooth. In 1991 the Army began fielding the M998A2 model, which addressed some of the concerns voiced by units after Operation Desert Storm. The A2 version of the M998 accounts for less than half of the Humvee fleet however, and despite efforts in the mid 1990’s to rebuild the aging fleet, cost ultimately precluded the proposals execution (see a related...

BAGHDAD — The ideal, soldiers say, is that no one in Iraq should have to go outside the wire in anything less than M-1114 factory up-armored Humvee. The reality is, little more than 20 percent of Humvees in Iraq are armored, and some soldiers trust their survival to a few sandbags and steel sheets. Until the ideal is attainable, Master Sgt. Dennis P. Lichtenberg is striving to create the best-protected Humvees short of an M-1114. Lichtenberg has invented a system he calls “The Lick Kit,” a play on his nickname “Lick,” pinned on by fellow reservists from the Pensacola, Fla.-based...