SAN ANTONIO – Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio is in the midst of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar project to remove or consolidate equipment in the military's Humvees to make them safer for soldiers.
Kase Saylor, an SWRI manager of research and development, said over the years valuable equipment has been added to the military vehicles, but it has come at a cost: the loss of space inside and a danger to the vehicle's occupants.
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"What happens is you have Vendor A, Vendor B, all providing different types of solutions, all with their own equipment," Saylor said. "You get a vehicle that gets completely full of equipment, so much that they're actually welding braces around equipment so soldiers can't rip them out."
Saylor displayed a photo of a Humvee (above) before conversion that shows metal and plastic boxes mounted all over the front driver and passenger compartments, easily demonstrating how cramped Humvees can become.
The equipment included devices such as sniper detection equipment, IED electronic trigger detection equipment and several different GPS devices.
"(Soldiers) have full battle gear (on) and so you can just imagine the amount of equipment they already carry and then they've got to fit inside a vehicle," Saylor said. "The soldier's got to carry water, they've got to carry ammunition, get in and get out of the vehicle. (If) they roll over, if they're so encumbered by equipment they can't get out and that's caused a safety issue."
After the SWRI conversion, Humvees have much less equipment and much more room for soldiers.
Project Victory, as the Humvee conversion is being called, also allows the vehicle's air conditioning to function better.
"Most of the air conditioning is (now) used just to cool the equipment instead of providing comfort for the soldier," Saylor said.
The project began in 2010 and SWRI has provided ongoing improvements.
The institute is continuing to refine those improvements, meaning the project does not have an official end date.
Saylor said the result is a Humvee that is cheaper for the military to maintain.
"It's going to be more cost-effective, maintenance and logistics is going to be a big difference," Saylor said.
He said the next project may be making similar changes to military tanks.
"Tanks are also on our list," Saylor said. "They actually do gallons per mile."
That makes a Humvee's fuel efficiency sound pretty good.