Desert Patrol Vehicle - Armament

Armament

The original tests used commercial dune buggies modified to carry weapons such as TOW missiles and recoilless rifles. The recoilless rifles still had enough recoil to flip the lightweight dune buggies and were abandoned. The TOW missiles had much greater success, but they violated existing Army TOW doctrine. The Army had determined that a TOW needed a 3 man team to operate it. The DPVs could only carry a two man crew and they seemed perfectly capable of operating the TOW, but this would have meant revising Army doctrine and possibly changing TOW deployment throughout the Army. Fort Benning decided to offer a "superior" DPV design that allowed a third crewman. This design was rejected by the HTLD team and was never produced.

The basic weapons on a DPV consist of a heavy .50 caliber M2 Browning machine gun, two lighter 7.62x51 mm M60 machine guns, and two M136 AT4 anti-armor weapons. In some cases, the driver's M60 or the gunner's M2 is replaced with a 40 mm Mk 19 grenade launcher. Other light machine guns such as the M240 machine gun or 5.56x45 mm M249 SAW can also be mounted.