Livermore lab's armor kits earn good review from troops

By Betsy Mason
Contra Costa Times
Fri, Jul. 22, 2005

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, who have developed a new brand of gun truck armor, are being credited with saving lives of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.

One of the newly fitted trucks was shown off Thursday in Washington, D.C., where Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-El Cajon, chairman of the powerful House Armed Services Committee praised the lab's "great talented folks" for protecting seven soldiers whose truck was hit near Fallujah in March.

"The driver sent back a message. All seven are breathing today, and sends his thanks," Hunter said.

The explosive device "basically destroyed the truck, but the seven crew members walked away with just scratches," said Steve DeTeresa, a lab materials engineer and leader of the armored truck project.

The project was started in February 2004, in response to a request from Hunter. At the time, troops were using unarmored, lightly skinned vehicles vulnerable to roadside bombs, said DeTeresa.

"We wanted to address the main threats of hidden bombs or improvised explosive devices, sometimes followed by ambushes," he said.

The armored truck conversion kits developed by the lab convert five-ton supply trucks into armored gun trucks with the addition of several machine guns. So far, 31 trucks in Iraq have been converted and are being used in convoys.

When design work began, DeTeresa said his team saw that troops were basically assembling their own trucks from scrap metal that looked remarkably similar to gun-trucks used during the Vietnam War.

Livermore researchers consulted with gun-truck veterans of Vietnam to design an upgraded version to reflect differences in warfare in Iraq.

A prototype truck was built at Livermore the following month and tested at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. It was shipped to a battalion north of Baghdad in July 2004. In December, 30 more gun truck kits were delivered to troops in Iraq and the Army has allocated $2 million for production of 80 more kits.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has chipped in an additional $1.5 million.

After the prototype, production of the kits was transferred to contractors in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Massachusetts.

The kits are made of armor steel and ballistic fiberglass panels that provide a wall of protection around the truck bed and cab. Machine-gun operators are protected by two- by-two-foot sections of transparent armor that extend above the protective wall. The kits can easily be assembled in five hours and cost about $40,000 each.

The kits are getting good reviews from the troops who report feeling safe in them, and armored gun trucks are becoming known as "the soldier's choice," DeTeresa said.

Gun trucks have an advantage over other vehicles because they are heavier and can carry more armor, they are up higher and provide good visibility, and they carry multiple guns.

Milt Finger, the former head of Department of Defense programs at the lab who oversaw the lab program, said in a news release Thursday, "Everyone on the LLNL team felt privileged to be able to have an impact in protecting our soldiers overseas."

The whole program was on a fast track, with testing crews in Maryland and others working double shifts to test and gather data.

The Livermore team was highly motivated for the project because the payoff was safer troops, DeTeresa said: "It's not something that we at the laboratory normally get to do."