Should Our Military Have Its Eye on the Jackal 2?

While reading a few articles on the BBC website, I came upon a piece, with video about the newly developed (well, newly upgraded, anyway) Jackal 2 armed vehicle.

The unit looks really stout, and seems to be on its way to close to impervious to much of what has been causing our troops such trouble in Iraq, Improvised Explosive Devices. These IEDs are what 60 Minutes showed were chewing up many of the vehicles our troops were driving, including the less-than-fully armored Hummers and troop carriers.

The story on the Jackal 2 looks good, as the Brits have learned from the problems from IEDs encountered by Jackal 1’s.

The engine, transmission and suspension are basically the same, however the chassis has been upgraded allowing the vehicle to carry a greater load and give it greater strength - vital if a vehicle is to survive the blast from a roadside bomb. The majority of casualties linked to the Jackal in Afghanistan were caused by IEDs.

The Jackal 2 can travel 1000km on a single tank of fuel

The Minister for Defence Equipment and Support, Quentin Davies, said that amongst the troops in Afghanistan, The Jackal was one of the most popular vehicles after the Mastiff protected patrol vehicle, despite some casualties, and he expected Jackal 2 to be equally well received.

“The object is to continually improve our portfolio of vehicles. We produce a vehicle, it goes to the front line and we take account the experience of the front line including disasters and fatalities.

The Jackal 1 has been in service in Afghanistan since April 2008

“We feed that back to the engineers and see if we can improve the vehicle. And so there is a continual process of improvement,” he said.

With the government possibly looking for a new manufacturer of vehicles, since GM won’t exactly be ramping up production of anything major, anytime soon, maybe we need to buddy up to our friends in the UK and get a deal on a few hundred of these, since we seem to be headed for more war in Afghanistan.

Mr Davies said that although the Jackal 2 was expensive, it was money well spent.

“People are defending their country with their lives, they deserve the best equipment money can buy.”

I couldn’t say it any better. We need to give our troops the very best as well – even if we don’t make it here.

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In Russia we only had two TV channels. Channel One was propaganda. Channel Two consisted of a KGB officer telling you: Turn back at once to Channel One.Yakov Smirnoff

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