That might get them to do their job - giving our troops the protection they need- a heck of a lot better. In April and in August I wrote about the poor job being done to arm our troops. Today's NY Times reports on a Pentagon study that documents that 300 or more lives could have been saved if better armor had been available.
The armor originally - and in most cases still being - used did not cover shoulders, sides and other areas of the body. In September 2005, almost two-and-a-half years after we started this campaign, the Marines finally started buying armor to cover the sides of our troops. The company building this armor has managed to produce 2200 of the 28,000 sets ordered; at this rate it will take forty months to complete the contract! Some of our soldiers have resorted to buying their own extra armor.
I guess the Marines had some clue that better body armor was needed since they asked for data on wounds back in August 2004. However, they could not come up with $107,000 to pay for the analysis until December. They started getting the analytical data in June 2005. How many Marines died because of poor armor in these ten months?
Protecting our trucks is also a difficult task for our procurement people. The Cougar armored truck which is performing very well in Iraq is being built by a small company that had never mass-produced vehicles. It is now three months behind schedule and the subject of a false-claims case that accuses the company of falsifying records. Armoring all of our Humvees will not happen until June 2006.
But everything is going swimmingly in Iraq as the insurgency is in its last throes.
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