Kitchen Builders Serve Up Safer Humvees

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Kitchen Builders Serve Up Safer Humvees

James Joyner | Saturday, June 18, 2005

Kitchen Builders Serve Up Safer Humvees (American Forces Press Service)

If there is a government building here in the nation’s capital, said James Phillip Poole of American Metal Fabricators Inc., chances are his company has built its food-service equipment.

[...]

But Poole’s company stands out in another way: If there is a Humvee driving the sometimes mean streets of Iraq, odds are good that Poole’s company had something to do with the protection of the soldiers inside. In spring 2004, a military supplier with a long professional relationship with Poole approached him and asked if his company could produce armor plating to frame a bulletproof windshield. The supplier had won a bid to help bulletproof the glass on Humvees.

The two companies had worked together on past projects, but never on anything like the Humvee project. The Humvee plan would require that a 100-plus-pound bulletproof glass stay in place if the vehicle hit an eight-inch curb at 80 miles an hour, and it would also have to deflect small arms and shrapnel.

[...]

“We built one and (the supplier and military) tested it. … They set a blast off between some vehicles that would blow the vehicles apart,” Poole said. “The windows held up through the test and (the military) started to order them, and we’ve been doing it ever since.”

Impressive. Now, if they could figure out a way to protect the underside from IEDs.

About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.

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