So, say ‘”so long” to the old High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle — The Humvee.

The Army is replacing the vulnerable vehicles with the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected thing called MRAP. They cost a million each, and the Army Times quotes a Pentagon source as saying 8,500 will be procured for fiscal 2008 and another 9,000 the next year, when all 17,700 Humvees now in Iraq will have been cashiered. The MRAP, we’re told, will not mean the end of development of yet a third vehicle, the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle.

Question: what’s to become of the 17,700 Humvees to be replaced?

Suggestion: make them surplus available to civilian sale. Traffic being what it is and is becoming, a military Humvee with a gun implacement on top will find an anxiously ready market, giving new and vibrant meaning to the phrase, “road rage.”