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Right now we are fighting a conventional war and we have never encounter IED’s at the
rate that we are doing and losing our soldiers and the injuries that we receive and the casualties
that come in. We have to protect our soldiers from this so the need came from our combat
developers to develop something that protect our soldiers from these explosives. The soldiers
were saying that they needed to have a way to evacuate our injured soldiers.
So that’s what we did. We came up with a dedicated casevac kit which provides a method
to support a litter in a hummvee and a metical kit that provides life saving gear at the
point of injury. This lead up to develop a similar kit for the Mind Resistant Ambush
Protected Program and now thousands of casevac kits are being fielded to theater in both
Iraq and Afghanistan to do causality evacuation with vehicles of opportunity.
The benefits of having mrap and casevac capability is that we are able to quickly get to the
soldier at the point of injury and get him back to the vehicle or treat him right there
where they are. The survival rate has really risen from the Vietnam War where we didn’t
have this type of treatment platform that we have now in the vehicle. We now have a
capability that we never had before in any war. To actually treat and take care the wounds
before you get them to the rear. And that means that we can stop the bleeding at the
point of injury and that’s very critical. The statistics show that we are really saving
lives and I think it’s somewhere in the range of 85% of casualties that lives are
saved.
This group is made up of engineers and engineering technicians. It has a machine shop, a sheet
metal shop, a welding shop, a painting shop, and a wood shop. And we work together to whiteboard
ideas and develop ideas into working prototypes.
My team is very proud of everything that we have put out in the field for the soldiers
and we continue to look for new and better ways to put products out to our soldiers to
make sure we save lives.