MRAPs
Years before the war began, Pentagon officials knew of the effectiveness of another type of vehicle that better shielded troops from bombs like those that have killed Kincaid and 1,500 other soldiers and Marines. But military officials repeatedly balked at appeals — from commanders on the battlefield and from the Pentagon's own staff — to provide the lifesaving Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, for patrols and combat missions, USA TODAY found.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates late last month, two U.S. senators said the delays cost the lives of an estimated "621 to 742 Americans" who would have survived explosions had they been in MRAPs rather than Humvees.
The letter, from Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., assumed the initial calls for MRAPs came in February 2005, when Marines in Iraq asked the Pentagon for almost 1,200 of the vehicles. USA TODAY found that the first appeals for the MRAP came much earlier.
As early as December 2003, when the Marines requested their first 27 MRAPs for explosives-disposal teams, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of the vehicles to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by USA TODAY show. Later pleas came from Iraq, where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced — adding armor to the sides of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts beneath the vehicles.
I could add this to the body-armour issue, the Walter Reed mess, the cuts to veteran’s health care, and numerous other failings of the Bush Administration when it comes to actually doing something to “Support the Troops” and not just spout the words. Certainly they do deserve a fair bit of the blame for this. Particularly Rumsfeld, who let his vision of what he wanted the military to look like interfere with what it needed to be. But the truth goes beyond the Bush Administration and right to the core of the current US military culture.
This is a military that is trying to fight a war while maintaining a peace-time culture. Part of that is the fault of the administration over it, but the responsibility also lies within the Pentagon itself. Acquisition of new equipment is being done at a peacetime pace. Sitting behind desks and looking at powerpoint slides doesn't grant someone much of a sense of urgency. The senior commanders got to where they are because they were successful bureaucrats and they don't want to upset things too much and risk losing lucrative retirements in the defense industries. As a result, they are always on the lookout for new and expensive toys to buy from their prospective future employers and are not bothered by long lead times for shiny new toys, if they even get to the production stage.
And like most effective military solutions, the MRAP’s are neither new nor expensive.
The MRAP was not new to the Pentagon. The technology had been developed in South Africa and Rhodesia in the 1970s, making it older than Kincaid and most of the other troops killed by homemade bombs. The Pentagon had tested MRAPs in 2000, purchased fewer than two dozen and sent some to Iraq. They were used primarily to protect explosive ordnance disposal teams, not to transport troops or to chase Iraqi insurgents.
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McGriff foresaw some of the turmoil over vehicles in a prophetic 2003 paper for the School for Advanced Warfighting in Quantico.
"Currently, our underprotected vehicles result in casualties that are politically untenable and militarily unnecessary," his paper read. "Failure to build a MRAP vehicle fleet produces a deteriorating cascade of effects that will substantially increase" risks for the military while "rendering it tactically immobile." Mines and IEDs will force U.S. troops off the roads, he wrote, and keep them from aggressively attacking insurgents.
The words were strong and the conclusions were damning. Rhodesia, a nation with nothing near the resources of the U.S. military, had built MRAPs more than a quarter-century earlier that remained "more survivable than any comparable vehicle produced by the U.S. today," McGriff wrote.
If you ever wonder how a bunch of seemingly poorly-equiped, massively underfunded insurgents can fight the US military to a standstill, this last point is as good as any in illustrating the reasons.
Part of the myth of the US military is that it is the best in the world at everything, and has or will find a high-tech solution to anything the enemy can come up with, and if you don’t believe that, Tom Clancy will be happy to explain it to you. And of course if it isn’t really expensive, it’s not worth looking at.
Truthfully, the US isn’t even the leader in many war-fighting technologies, but even more to the point, the philosophy of finding high-tech and expensive solutions to every problem creates an institutional blindness to cheaper and simpler solutions.
The Joint IED Defeat Organization has spent at least $3 billion on defeating IED’s by creating signal jammers, remote detonators, and so forth. In the meantime an off-the-shelf solution was sitting right in front of them.
Of course, now that they have delayed for so long, even these new MRAPs will be insufficient. They’ve been successful so far because of their rarity. The article notes that the newer Explosively Formed Penetrator type bombs the insurgents have begun using are effective against this type of vehicle. Once the MRAPs start to be deployed in large numbers, you can bet that large numbers of EFPs will be there to great them.
Once again, the insurgents are several decision cycles ahead of the US military.
