Meet The Parental Units
I’m not terribly well versed in modern combat vehicles, but I found the following chain of causality pretty interesting.
The picture below is of a Stryker, produced by General Dynamic Land Systems, a combat vehicle recently in the news for being the buggy of choice for the last American combat unit to leave Iraq.
– and this is its Papa, the Canadian LAV III, also produced by General Dynamic Land Systems.
Finally, here’s grandpa, the Swiss Piranha IIIC, produced by MOWAG.
It’s interesting to see how much intermingling of equipment is going on – but I do find it funny that Canadians seem to have been thoroughly out-pizazzed, even by the Swiss, in naming their iteration.
Also, I was glad to see a different manufacturer for the Piranha. I was becoming concerned that General Dynamic was some sort of shadowy skynet-style arms manufacturer.
The MOWAG Piranha is a family of armoured fighting vehicles designed by the Swiss MOWAG (since April 2010 the name has changed to General Dynamics European Land Systems – Mowag GmbH), corporation. – wikipedia
Pretty sure DND chose the name light armored vehicle not GD. Stryker gets it’s name from the surname of a US military family. Also Boyce the bars on the Stryker, that’s something they came up with on the fly after taking on so many RPG attacks. The bars (hopefully) detonate the rpg before it his and penetrates the armor. I used to work for them prior to this job I have now.
Very nice. I read about the ‘Stryker’ naming situation, although I find it a little suspect that they named it after two different guys who were apparently unrelated. I suspect the name caught someone’s eye and the justification was easy to put out there.
Although, I do choose to believe, temporal paradox aside, that they named the Cobra helicopter after Marion Cobretti.
Keep in mind Canada doesn’t want to seem aggressive, also why the LAV doesn’t have a badass name
Yeah, good point. It would be tough to bring “Death-Monger IV” on a peacekeeping mission.
Interesting that the Swiss named that the Piranha, because that vehicle is not amphibious.
Very true.