|
Born Against
|
Here's the text of the amendment. I don't see what's to criticize in it. All it does is budget $213M for Humvees, and require regular reports.
The only sense I can make of that vote is that the Senate is so polarized that the Republicans voted against the amendment on principle, because it was sponsored by Democrats, one of whom was Edward Kennedy.
And I really have to agree with the original poster, if the vote had been the other way around, the media and the Republicans would have used it to bash the Dems.
Quote:
Sec. 1122. (a) Additional Amount for Other Procurement, Army._The amount appropriated by this chapter under the heading "Other Procurement, Army" is hereby increased by $213,000,000, with the amount of such increase designated as an emergency requirement pursuant to section 402 of the conference report to accompany S. Con. Res. 95 (108th Congress).
(b) Availability of Funds._Of the amount appropriated or otherwise made available by this chapter under the heading "Other Procurement, Army", as increased by subsection (a), $213,000,000 shall be available for the procurement of Up-Armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (UAHMMWVs).
(c) Reports._(1) Not later 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, and every 60 days thereafter until the termination of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report setting forth the current requirements of the Armed Forces for Up-Armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles.
(2) Not later than 60 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report setting forth the most effective and efficient options available to the Department of Defense for transporting Up Armored High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles to Iraq and Afghanistan.
|
Here are Bayh's (D-IN) comments before the vote:
Quote:
Mr. BAYH . Mr. President, I call up this amendment to address what has been a chronic and pressing need on the part of our military forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Mr. President, there is an old saying we are all familiar with: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Mr. President, fool me nine times, and it qualifies as an emergency that must be addressed, particularly when the lives and limbs of our military men and women are at stake. Specifically, I refer to the fact that the United States Army has now, on nine consecutive occasions, underestimated the need for uparmored humvees in the theater of Iraq. This has been a matter of some public attention in Newsweek Magazine and elsewhere. It is a chronic need we need to address now.
The figure the Army indicates they currently need_and allegedly have met_would not have been met at all if, last year, we had not taken similar action to do what I am currently requesting. They would have had funding for thousands of fewer vehicles and not met the need that currently they suggest is imperative. The figure they are saying is sufficient today includes_think about this_a range of attrition of 226 vehicles throughout the combat in Iraq. They have only lost 226 uparmored humvees throughout the last 2 years in that theater. This is below the attrition rate of 10 to 15 percent, suggesting strongly that they are erring yet again_for the tenth time.
I ask my colleagues, when it comes to something this important, with a track record of underestimating the need this clear, should we not err on the side of doing more, rather than less, when it comes to protecting the lives and safety of our military men and women?
I note some of my colleagues, who I esteem greatly on the other side of the aisle, will suggest the generals are simply saying we don't have an additional need at this time. Mr. President, that is not what the troops are saying. Do you remember the one brave soldier who brought to the attention of the Secretary of Defense the fact that they were having to resort to what he called "hillbilly armor" for their protection? We should not allow this deplorable condition to continue.
I remind my colleagues again, in spite of what the generals are currently saying in a letter circulating, they have been wrong nine consecutive times. The credibility on this issue is not that great. It is also suggested perhaps we should take our resources_and I understand they are scarce_and allocate them instead to have striker vehicles instead of uparmored humvees.
Mr. President, I submit this is a false choice. When it comes to protecting our troops, we should do whatever it takes to get the job done and not leave some exposed to unnecessary harm while choosing instead to protect others. We can afford to do both.
Mr. President, I conclude my comments by saying how much I respect Senator Cochran and Senator Stevens but the track record here is very clear. On nine consecutive occasions, the Army has underestimated the need. The need wouldn't be met today for the number of vehicles suggested in their letter if we had not acted last year. Let us err on the side of doing more rather than less. Let us take this action to protect our troops. It is the very least we can do when they are in harm's way on our behalf.
Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Kennedy, myself, and others, I ask we take this action.
I yield back the remainder of my time and ask for the yeas and nays.
|
And here is Kennedy's argument in favor of the amendment (that he co-sponsored):
Quote:
KENNEDY . Mr. President, Senator Bayh and I have an amendment on Humvees the floor manager is familiar with. I am going to speak on that issue. The amendment is a Bayh-Kennedy amendment. My colleague and friend, the Senator from Indiana, intends to address the Senate very shortly on this issue. I wanted to take an opportunity, in these final hours of consideration of the supplemental, to bring this to the attention of the Senate and the American people.
I am delighted to join my colleague Senator Bayh in sponsoring our amendment which increases the funding for the procurement of up-armored Humvees for the Army. The Senate is currently debating an appropriations bill that will provide $81 billion primarily for the ongoing war in Iraq. This funding will bring the total United States bill for the war in Iraq to $192 billion and still counting. All of us support our troops. We obviously want to do all we can to see that they have the proper equipment, vehicles, and everything else they need to protect their lives and carry out their missions.
It is scandalous that the administration has kept sending them into battle in Iraq without the proper equipment. No soldier should be sent into battle unprotected. That is exactly what happened in Iraq. As recently as December 2004, soldiers were still digging through landfills to find metal plating to attach to their vehicles for protection_their "hillbilly" armor, they call it. It has also been well documented that parents went in desperation to the local Wal-Mart to buy armored plates and mail them to their sons and daughters serving in Iraq. That is incomprehensible and unacceptable for our soldiers. More than 400 troops have already died in military vehicles, vulnerable to roadside bombs, grenades, and other so-called improvised explosive devices. Our amendment will provide additional funding to buy up-armored Humvees and add-on armor kits for the Humvees for the Army.
As we all know, the Humvee is a highly mobile four-wheel-drive vehicle. The up-armored Humvee is a version with bullet-resistant windows and steel-plate armor on the doors and underside to protect against rifle rounds and explosive blasts. It has additional armor for the turret gunner on the roof to protect against artillery, and a powerful air conditioning system. The add-on armor kits are mounted on the existing Humvees to give almost as much protection.
According to a Philadelphia Inquirer article 2 weeks ago, the Army says all of its 35,000 vehicles in Iraq now have some sort of armor. But a third of them are protected with nothing more than crudely cut sheets of steel which are inadequate by the Army's own standards, according to figures released Friday. The largest threats for vehicles are improvised explosive devices, rocket-propelled grenades, small arms fire, and landmines.
Humvees and other military vehicles have become the target of choice for insurgents. Shrapnel from roadside bombs or even a simple AK-47 round can slice through an unprotected Humvee. Some of them have little more than vinyl fabric for their roofs and doors. Our troops in unprotected Humvees in Iraq would be safer riding in SUVs.
According to the Center for Army Lessons Learned, the harm to both personnel and equipment from improvised explosive devices is greatly reduced when traveling in an up-armored Humvee. It has taken far too long to solve this problem. We have to make sure we solve it now, once and for all. We can't keep throwing money at it and hope it goes away. The delay in correcting the problem has cost the lives of many brave young men and women killed in combat because they were in unarmored vehicles.
On July 20, 2003, SGT Justin Garvey, a Massachusetts casualty, was with the 101st Airborne Division and was killed in Mosul when his unarmored Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade while on patrol.
A few months later, on September 1, 2003, SSG Joseph Camara and SGT Charles Caldwell, Massachusetts natives with the Rhode Island National Guard, were killed north of Baghdad when their unarmored Humvee struck a mine.
On October 18, 2003, PFC John Hart of Bedford, MA, was killed in Taza in Iraq, when his unarmored Humvee was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. I attended his burial at Arlington National Cemetery on November 4, 2003. I still remember the letter the parents showed me from that young man saying he was out on patrol and if he did not get armor on his Humvee, the chances of his survival were going to be very limited. Three weeks later he was lost.
Last week, a Kentucky National Guard soldier died when shrapnel came through the window of his vehicle. A comrade says James A. Sherrill, 27, could have been saved if antiballistic glass had been installed.
The saddest part of this story is that the Army could have and should have moved more quickly to correct the problem. As retired GEN Paul Kern, who headed the Army Materiel Command until last November, said:
. . . It took too long to materialize. In retrospect, if I had it to do all over again, I would have just started building up-armored Humvees. The most efficient way would have been to build a single production line and feed everything into it.
In a letter to me dated October 20, 2003, General Abizaid, the CENTCOM Commander, said:
The FY 2004 Supplemental Request will permit the services to rapidly resolve many of the equipment issues that you mentioned to include the procurement of . . . Humvees.
That goes back to October 20, 2003, General Abizaid saying that the 2004 appropriations were going to solve this problem.
In February 2004, General Schoomaker, Chief of Staff of the Army, testified at an Armed Services Committee hearing that:
. . . the army never intended to up-armor every Humvee_never until this kind of situation that we have today . . . We have taken armored units, artillery units, all kind of other units and put them into Humvees as motorized formations, which never existed before. And so this is an area where you cannot fix it overnight.
That is in February of 2004. And we are now in April of 2005. The problem still hasn't been fixed.
On December 8, 2004, during a townhall meeting with the United States Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in Kuwait, a young soldier alerted the American public to the issue of armor shortages when he asked:
Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles and why don't we have those sources readily available to us?
After the applause from the troops, Rumsfeld replied:
It's essentially a matter of physics. It isn't a matter of money. It isn't a matter on the Army of desire. It's a matter of production and capability of doing it. As you know, you to go war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
He later remarked in the same townhall meeting:
You can have all the armor in the world on a tank and a tank can be blown up. And you can have an up-armored Humvee and it can be blown up.
We have been told for months that the shortage of up-armored Humvees was a thing of the past and the Army has enough to ensure that every Humvee that left a protected base in Iraq would be an up-armored Humvee or a Humvee with an add-on kit. This month, the GAO released a report that clearly identifies the struggle the Army has faced. In August 2003, only 51 up-armored Humvees were being produced a month. It took the industrial base a year and a half to work up to making 400 a month.
Imagine that. It took a year and a half for the United States of America to move from 50 a month to 400 a month; a year and a half. I don't know how many saw that incredible documentary on the History Channel the other night of President Roosevelt talking about the gearing up in World War II, where we were producing a victory ship a day, over 350,000 planes a year, this country. A victory ship a day we were producing, 350,000 planes a year, and it took us a year and a half to move from 50 to 400 a month. This wasn't given a priority. Of the 35 young Americans from Massachusetts who have been killed, a third of them have been killed from attacks on Humvees. [*S3969]
The great majority of those, the veterans say, could have survived if they had had the protected Humvees.
It is obvious the Department has no solution, did not have the priority to provide for the up-armor of the Humvees. Secretary of the Army Brownlee told the Armed Services Committee in October 2003 that:
. . . with the up-armored Humvee, it is more of a challenge. If we go strictly with the up-armored Humvee, it could be as late as the summer of '05 before we would have them all.
This is in October 2003, we are told in the Armed Services Committee it is going to be the summer of 2005 before our troops are going to have the protection they should. Since it is now spring 2005, it looks as though he was right.
According to the GAO report, there are two primary causes for the shortage of up-armored vehicles and add-on armor kits. First, a decision was made to ramp up production gradually rather than use the maximum available capacity. Second, the funding allocations did not keep up with the rapidly increasing requirements. Obviously, the Pentagon was still being influenced by its cakewalk mentality.
The GAO report specifically states that the Pentagon decisionmakers set the rate at which both up-armored Humvees and armor kits would be produced and did not tell Congress about the total available production capacity. The GAO was unable to determine what criteria were used to set the pace of production. In both cases, additional production capacity was available, particularly for the kits, but not used.
The funding issue was part of the problem. Funds were available to support the planned pace of production of up-armored Humvees. But GAO found that four program managers were not aware of the timeframe for releasing funds. Although the Army received over $1.4 billion between fiscal years 2003 and 2004 to produce 7,500 vehicles, it was not released in a timely and predictable way. In August of 2003, the managers received requirements for 1,407 vehicles, but had received funding to produce less than half of that number.
By October 2003, program managers had a requirement to produce 3,000 vehicles, but once again received funding to produce less than half of that. Significant differences continued until April of 2004, when requirements reached 4,400 vehicles and the program managers received funding to produce 4,300 vehicles.
The major short-term solution to the up-armored Humvee funding issue has been the additional funds from congressional increases. Parents and spouses of fallen service members contacted Members of Congress to demand attention to the problem. For fiscal years 2003 and 2004, the Army received over $1.4 billion to produce 7,500 up-armored Humvees to meet worldwide requirements, including 8,000 vehicles required for the CENTCOM's area of operation.
In fiscal year 2004, the Army received more than $1 billion to produce up-armored Humvees. Compared to the Bush administration's budget request for $51 million, the parents and spouses made an enormous impact. To meet the continuing needs for force protection, Congress recommended $865 million in the 2005 appropriations bill to be used by the Army for additional armor for Humvees and other vehicles.
As part of the Rapid Response Force Protection Initiative, Congress intends the funds to be used for a variety of vehicles to respond rapidly to the threat of improvised explosive devices and mortar attacks against our forces. These are short-term fixes.
Amazingly, the GAO found that Army officials have still not made long-term efforts to improve the availability of up-armored Humvees or add-on armor kits. We need to get ahead of this problem. The requirements for up-armored Humvees keep changing.
Of the time I have been in the Armed Services Committee, we have had nine different estimates by the military_I will include them in the Record_in their testimony before us, going from 30 September 2003, for 1700; November 2003, 3,000. Then they kept going up by thousands over time.
Young American servicemen who are out on patrols do not have that equipment. It is one thing if the insurgents have some surprise capability and some technique or technology that we are not prepared to deal with, but we know how to uparmor humvees and we know how to make armor plating.
The fact that we have young people who are risking their lives without that protection is what this amendment is about. I know we will hear from the other side_because I have heard it every time I have been part of offering an increase in the funding for the last 3 years_we have enough, we don't need more. We will hear that here again. But we find out that we are still shortchanging the military.
Gary Motsek, Director of Support Operations for the Army Materiel Command in Fort Belvoir, VA, said:
I'm going to get in trouble, but the real challenge is, there had always been an assumption, quite frankly, that the requirements would continue to tail off.
Obviously, since we are still losing an average of more than one soldier a day since the Iraqi elections in January, those assumptions are clearly wrong.
It is a tragedy that our soldiers are still paying the price for this delay. In 2003, when it came time to mass-produce uparmored humvees, the Army had only a single source to turn to. It had little interest in this work before Iraq and did not shop for others. Pentagon Acquisition Chief, Michael Wynne, testified to Congress a year ago:
It's a sad story to report to you, but had we known then what we know now, we would probably have gotten another source involved. Every day, our soldiers are being killed or wounded in Iraq by IEDs, RPGs, small arms fire. Too many of these attacks are on humvees that are not uparmored. . . . We are directing that all measures to provide protection to our soldiers be placed on a top priority, most highly urgent, 24-7 basis.
That is his recent statement and we welcome it. In his testimony, Wynne said: It is a sad story, but had we known what the parents knew and what those on the front lines knew, certainly we would have acted quicker.
But 24-7 didn't happen even then until January this year. The plant had capacity that the Army never consistently used, as the plant manager has said.
In November 2003, I asked Secretary Brownlee about armor delays, noting that the three Massachusetts soldiers had died in unarmored humvees. "Are they running their plant 24 hours?" Secretary Brownlee said the plant in Ohio was running at "maximum capacity." But it wasn't. Army documents show the monthly armor production at the plant fell after that, from about 55 to 45 humvees a month, in December.
The plant took its usual week off at Christmas and the armoring plant took two 4-day weekends. Owners say they could have built more_if the Army had ordered it.
In early 2004, Members of Congress toured the plant and found that its ballistic glass operation was operating on just one shift.
Now we have an opportunity to end this frustration once and for all. Our soldiers in Iraq deserve the very best, and it is our job to make sure the Department of Defense is finally getting it right. Too many soldiers have died because of these needless delays, but hopefully this will be solved by what we do in this bill today.
The Bayh-Kennedy amendment contributes significantly to this goal. I urge my colleagues to support this bill.
Mr. President, I point out that in the House they have found that there wasn't sufficient funding for the President's request. The House appropriators increased their appropriations by $232 million. They thought that was the bare minimum to bring it up on their review of the shortage.
I think the Bayh-Kennedy amendment is much closer to the real need. But clearly it is very important that we have an increase in this particular funding in this area.
Mr. President, I hope the committee is willing to accept the amendment.
I ask unanimous consent that a paper indicating rising humvee requirements be printed in the Record.
|
|