Unintended Consequences

Remember all of the outcry because Rumsfeld wasn’t getting better armored Humvees to the troops? Well, it turns out that the new “up armored” Humvees in Iraq are apparently killing more soldiers in rollovers than they’re saving with the new armor:

…serious accidents involving the M1114 have increased as the war has progressed, and the accidents were much more likely to be rollovers than those of other Humvee models, the newspaper reported.

Duhhhhh!

Increasing the vehicle mass, and coincidentally raising the center of mass, is obviously going to decrease its stability in turns. Didn’t anyone consider this when they came up with the design? People forget that this vehicle was a replacement for the jeep, not the tank.

This is a classic engineering safety trade, but soldiers killed in auto accidents don’t get all the press that the ones killed with IEDs do. That doesn’t fit the template that we’re losing the war, because they were killed by media outcry, not terrorists.