Photos: Army touts top tech inventions

In 2004, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously told a National Guardsman serving in Iraq, "As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want." The soldier had been inquiring about the readiness of Humvees for combat conditions--specifically, the need to "up-armor" the vehicles to provide better protection against enemy fire.

But even if a nation's military has to do the best it can with the gear it has, it can also plan ahead for the gear it knows it will need. That's the dual premise behind the U.S. Army's recent recognition of what it calls its "top 10 greatest inventions for 2006." Fittingly, several of the honored inventions deal specifically with the threat that improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, pose to vehicles--and the soldiers riding in them.

Sometimes, small things can make a big difference. This photo shows one of the inventions, the Humvee Crew Extraction D-ring, created by an engineering team at the Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. "There was an issue of soldiers getting trapped inside Humvees that had been damaged for whatever reason...enemy fire or being flipped. Soldiers had problems getting the doors off these up-armored Humvees, so we took their advice and created the D-ring," Wesley Patterson, Fast Assistance in Sciences Team member, said in a statement. The FAST program is designed to provide fixes to problems within six months.

The D-ring provides a solid anchor point to which a chain or cable can be attached to pull open damaged doors.