Madam Chair, I'd be happy to do that.
Our requirement was stated, as we said, in performance terms of protection levels from improvised explosive devices, mines, and direct fire from what's called an RPG, a rocket-propelled grenade--formerly produced by the Soviet Union--with wide proliferation in many parts of the world. They will penetrate up to a metre of steel--a metre.
You can defeat those with certain technologies and composites and what we call bar armour, which defeats the fuse before it strikes a tank. You have to have a vehicle that can carry the weight, and you have to have a vehicle that will defeat the high-velocity fragments and blast underneath and have sufficient mass so that the whole vehicle isn't thrown into the air. We really needed a robust larger vehicle that could clear the routes and take this beating instead of having our light armoured vehicles do it.
That was the fundamental requirement driver. We did not want to have to design one; we wanted to buy one off the shelf. They are no longer in production, so the choice was surplus main battle tanks that had that protection and mobility and were available on the market.