MRAP Armor Weight Reduction Spiral Program

On a related note, there's the MRAP Armor Weight Reduction Spiral Program, from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. "The program's goal was to introduce lightweight composites, new materials, and enhanced ballistic mechanisms to reduce the add-on weight of final armor packages," says the Army. "The program's technical approach combined cutting-edge high-performance computing with highly instrumented terminal effects experimentation."

Depending on their configuration and their payload, MRAPs can weigh upwards of 16 tons, compared with roughly 5 tons for a Humvee.