doors? a roof? nah, we don't need that
They're apparently planning to buy 2.5k of these too! Light skeletonized utility trucks like this have been around for a while, but as a very specific niche for special forces, not general issue
Except now all the Infantry Brigade Combat Teams (which the US apparently has a ton of, you'd think the wealthiest country in the world would have, like, a mostly fully mechanized infantry force and not nearly half of its units without even organic APCs, but I guess not) are going to be converted to Mobile Brigade Combat Teams, mounted on these things.
Something I found interesting is that the Soviets actually trialed a similar concept of airborne troops mounted in stripped-down utility trucks all the way back in the '80s, with similar motivation - lighter-equipped units are easier to redeploy via air, as it takes less plane trips (and opens up the usage of more plentiful smaller planes) to get all their gear in place: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYSb5VsQxNY
Except they pretty quickly came to the conclusion that this concept just doesn't work out that well. And even if they'd gone forward with it, there would have likely been just a handful of units like this, with the bulk of Soviet infantry remaining properly mechanized (in BTRs/BMPs for regular infantry, and BMDs for airborne).
Oh well, I guess the Americans have to see for themselves.
Okay, so... a bit of an exaggeration. But for all the money that is flowing around the "military" it is absolutely not equally distributed among units and posts. The farther away you are from the "glory boy" units the more likely you will find yourself in units with 5 vehicles in a platoon where two of them are just used for parts to keep the other three running because "the money just isn't there" to buy enough batteries or fuel pumps to keep all five vehicles fully mission capable.
I'm also reminded of the push to make smaller lighter more mobile units from, like, the 2010's(ish). It wouldn't surprise me that this is just ancient political/military leadership moving along with that plan because its already there and those who are skimming money off the top of every stage of this thing are not interested in having their bag fucked with.
Also also, wouldn't be surprised if absolutely nobody is considering drone warfare in pushing these dune buggies out the door.
Yeah, that's something important to remember about the US. It's easy to just look at the humongous overall budget and assume every branch must be decked out, but in reality the ground branch has, since pretty much the end of WW2, tended to get the short end of the stick. And with the GWOT-era cult of the operator coming in, now even within the ground branch there's a big imbalance between certain fancy units and the regular infantry, with many of the latter being in a surprisingly sorry state. Which, uh, bodes pretty well for any hypothetical future invasions of certain Latin American countries...
There's been a persistent trend in Western perceptions of the Ukraine war of completely ignoring any implications it might have for mechanized warfare with the excuse of "they're slavs, they don't really know how to fight!". There's just this attitude of "well, we wouldn't get caught up in an attritional trench war because we're just so much better at combined arms!", people treat Combined Arms Warfare like some spell you can just shout at the enemy frontline to make it go up in smoke.
Same as when European military observes during the American Civil War looked at all the brutal sieges and trench warfare and just went "not really relevant to us, these colonials just don't know how to fight!", and then looked at some more brutal trench warfare in the Russo-Japanese war, now with machine guns and much larger-scale artillery bombardments making things even worse, and went "not really relevant to us, these orientals just don't know how to fight!". And then WW1 happened.