I am breathing a sigh of relief now that our "boys in blue" are finally doing something about that rash of RPG and IED attacks on the defenseless DCSD.
I wonder what tires, fuel, maintenance, etc are gonna run the taxpayers?
Its gonna need a snazzy paint job too... .
Does the 2nd cover IEDs? Theoretically anyway.
There’s a county in Georgia that went out a decade ago and bought a wheeled armored vehicle for ‘tactical support’. They had to send one of their mechanics off to a two-week school to know all the particulars of special repair for it. What they came to learn in the first six months as they used it....was that it came to break down on a fairly regular basis after the first year of operation.
After the warranty period ended, this repair business became expensive. Parts could be ordered, but it’d still take three-to-seven days for arrival....meaning the tactical vehicle sat there and usually couldn’t be of use.
The gas mileage? Well, it’s safe to say that it never got above three miles a gallon. So one trip to the end of the county and back....usually flushed out all of the fuel in the truck. You could imagine the budget guy sitting there and adding up diesel costs at the half-way point of the budget-year and falling off his chair.
So the vehicle got to be used less and less. Two years ago when the news media put out the story....they were using the vehicle strictly for parades and extreme episodes (figure four to six a year max). No spare parts were being kept and there’s probably six weeks out of the year that it was down for repairs anyway.
They couldn’t bring themselves to retire or dump the vehicle. They were hopeful that they could use the decline of this vehicle for another grant from Homeland Security down the line....that was my humble opinion in the end on this episode.
These are all expensive toys that the public have watched wannabe police organizations acquire and simply pump up tax revenue and budgets. It makes no sense and we would not have accepted this attitude a hundred years ago.