The U.S. Army needs lightweight artillery support for it's new lightweight armored car (LAV) brigades. The obvious solution is to put one of the two six round containers used on the tracked MLRS and mount it on a five ton truck. Simple, eh? Not in the peace time army. This idea came up in the 1980s, and one contractor (Vought) even did basic design work in 1985. But now another contractor (Lockheed-Martin) is working on it and they say they won't have preproduction models until 2002. If it were wartime, of course, you would have the truck mounted MLRS in production within a few months. The Israelis, for whatever reason, have managed to maintain this "wartime mentality" in producing weapons. Perhaps the U.S. Army ought to contract an Israeli manufacturer to do the truck MLRS. They would have them for combat units sometime next year.