Support: May 14, 2003

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The U.S. bought a nine 62 ton D9 armored bulldozers into Kuwait for the Iraq campaign. The D9s, and their Israeli made armor kit, were purchased because of the Israeli success with the dozen in urban warfare against Palestinian terrorists. America had used the D9 during the 1960s in Vietnam, but after that only used the smaller (35 ton, with armor kit) D7. The D9 was not needed for urban fighting in Iraq, but was found very useful (much more so than the smaller D7) for combat engineering tasks. The D9 quickly cleared highways of debris and built temporary roads for combat vehicles. One D9 was thought to be as useful as four D7s, and there is a lot of enthusiasm among combat engineers to keep the D9s, and get more of them.