Free Republic

Nigeria’s military has taken delivery of VT-4 main battle tanks, SH-5 self-propelled howitzers and other equipment from China in an effort to strengthen its land forces in the battle against Boko Haram militants.

While the dramas in Fallujah and Najaf come to a conclusion, the Army's soldiers are still riding the roads of Iraq in inferior armored vehicles while the better-protected armored personnel carriers are waiting for them in Kuwait. We're asking our troops to perform a job with the wrong tools, a mistake rooted in the 1999 decision by President Clinton's Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki to take the Army off tracks and put it on wheels. When, in July 2003, acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane laid out the overall Army plan to rotate the units stationed in...

Lightly protected vehicles in Iraq such as the Humvee and the U.S. Army's new wheeled Stryker are providing far too little protection for troops and should be replaced with heartier substitutes, senior military commanders have warned. Roadside bombs, rocket-propelled grenades and heavy automatic weapons are taking their toll on lightly-armored U.S. military vehicles and, worse, on the troops riding in them – despite Pentagon efforts to beef up protection. Currently the Defense Department is hurrying to replace the thin-skinned Humvees with "up-armored" models as quickly as possible. According to the London Daily Telegraph, U.S. forces have added scrap armor plating,...