Humvee could soon be an Army relic?

Army places its final order to factory for the iconic military vehicles even as civilian Hummer brand also heads to scrap heap.

By Carly Everson

Army Staff Sgt. Tom Davis never saw the bomb that destroyed his Humvee as he rounded a corner in Ramadi just a week into his second tour in Iraq in 2006.

Davis lost a leg and broke his back and both arms and can no longer walk or work. He'll never know whether he would have been less severely injured if he'd been in a different vehicle.

But his experience, and those of thousands of other Americans wounded in bomb-shredded Humvees in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years, foretold what now appears to be the official demise of the hulking all-terrain vehicles that came to symbolize the military as much as the Jeeps they replaced.

The Army provided no new money for the Humvee in its recent budget proposal. Army spokesman Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings said the 2,620 vehicles ordered from Mishawaka, Ind.-based AM General LLC will be the last Humvees as the Army moves on to newer designs.

Unless the decision is reversed, the Humvee will end a remarkable 30-year run that extended beyond the battlefield into popular culture.

The move comes as the military vehicle's civilian spinoff, the Hummer, also is rolling toward extinction. General Motors Co. said last month that it will shut down the iconic SUV brand after a bid to sell it to a Chinese industrial company collapsed.

The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, dubbed the Humvee by soldiers, got its start when the Army began looking to replace the Jeep in the late 1970s.

AM General won a prototype contract in 1981, and the company, a spinoff of Jeep, created the boxy vehicle, which was more than 7 feet wide and made up in utility for what it lacked in aesthetics. Since 1985, AM General has produced 240,000 Humvees.

The vehicle attracted attention during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, but not just in the war zone. Arnold Schwarzenegger became so enamored that he persuaded AM General to make a civilian version, the Hummer, and it became a status symbol for car lovers until rising gas prices and the recession sent sales plummeting.

"Everybody points at a Hummer," said Eric Sitterle of Cincinnati, who serves on the board of Hummer Club Inc., the vehicle's fan club. The group organizes off-road events all over the country. "It's the most exciting thing you've ever been on — at 3 mph."

Few would use the word "exciting" to describe the military Humvee. It was developed as a light utility vehicle and not intended as an armored car, said James Atwater, assistant curator at the U.S. Army Transportation Museum in Fort Eustis, Va.

The lumbering, low-riding vehicles became an easy target for insurgents, who attacked U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with increasingly powerful improvised explosive devices hidden along roadsides.

A mounting death toll from roadside bombs — more than 1,700 in Iraq alone as of January 2010 — sparked calls for better protection for soldiers. The Army ordered armored versions of the Humvee, but "there were shortcomings when you added armor to a vehicle like this that's not designed from the ground up for that," said Atwater.

Cummings said the Army is moving to the larger and more heavily armored Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles.

The latest Army budget still includes $989 million to maintain its fleet of Humvees. And Atwater said he thinks the Army will still use Humvees for missions on which it is impractical to drive a massive MRAP, which has tires of a size more often seen on monster trucks in demolition derbies.

AM General, the sole manufacturer of the Humvee, says it is talking with the Army and hopes to continue vehicle production into 2011. Congressional representatives — including U.S. Rep. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind., who represents the factory's district — have pledged to try to maintain a military role for the Humvee.

The Army purchases more than half the Humvees that AM General produces, but the Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy also buy some.

AM General also makes the Humvee's civilian counterpart, the H2 Hummer, as a contract assembler for General Motors. Hummer sales peaked at 71,524 in 2006 but dropped to 9,046 in 2009, leading to GM's recently failed effort to sell the brand.

Davis, of Angola, Ind., said the Humvees were fine during his first deployment in 2003.

"We rode in the back of the open Humvee at night because the IEDs weren't a real threat," he said.

But that began to change. The powerful bomb that wounded Davis in 2006 hurled the Humvee two stories into the air, killing the vehicle's gunner.

"Maybe if I'd been in a Bradley (armored vehicle), I wouldn't have been hurt as much," said Davis, 32, a father of four.