There would be two side doors, one in each side, covered with Kevlar panels and each having a large rectangular window also to have some form of Kevlar shutter although it was not shown or described. Deal suggested some form of louver could be used instead to reduce the risk of glare from the glass giving away the position of the vehicle. The windscreens of the vehicle would have to be replaced with two Kevlar shutters, each with two rectangular vision slots and hinged at the top to fold back over the roof when not in use. The suggestion was to take an existing M1038 vehicle and mount a new body onto it. The new variant would have a hard rigid body, making use of Kevlar panels and a hardtop but with a very large rectangular hatch that permitted multiple weapons to be used. The M1038, on the other hand, could mount a variety of weapons, all of which could be used at the same time, but was unsuitable because of a complete lack of protection. The M966 was seen as unsuitable primarily because armor was limited to just the Kevlar roof and the small hatch permitted just a single weapon mount. Deal suggested a new variant of the HMMWV halfway between the M966 hardtop and the M1038 ‘open top’. Deal was at the time a serving officer acting as a Scout Platoon leader for 1-63 Armor. The opportunity to use this new off-road platform as a dedicated scout vehicle was suggested by 1st Lieutenant Kenneth Deal in the November/December issue of Armor Magazine who pointed out that despite the capabilities of the HMMWV platform, none of the existing variants were suitable. The High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV) or ‘Humvee’ hadn’t long been in the inventory of the US Military by 1990 and was already a significant improvement over the hodgepodge of commercial pickups and light vehicles employed to fill the gap left by the Jeeps.
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