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From three months ago from Soldiers for the Truth:
03.03.2005
The Armor Scandal
Bureaucrats’ Inertia Cost the Lives of Our Troops
By Roger Charles
If you want to read a depressing, pathetic indictment of the Perfumed Princes of the Pentagon (those in and out of uniform), read the latest major investigative article in The New York Times today ("Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq," March 7, 2005).
According to article, the Pentagon's "difficulties in shielding troops and their vehicles with armor have been far more extensive and intractable than officials have acknowledged."
Here is but one example of the bureaucracy at work, according to the Times investigation:
"In the case of body armor, the Pentagon gave a contract for thousands of the ceramic plate inserts that make the vests bulletproof to a former Army researcher who had never mass-produced anything. He struggled for a year, then gave up entirely. At the same time, in shipping plates from other companies, the Army's equipment manager effectively reduced the armor's priority to the status of socks, a confidential report by the Army's inspector general shows. Some 10,000 plates were lost along the way, and the rest arrived [in Iraq] late."
"In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General [Richard] Cody placed the order. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting."
"By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days."
At the end of the article's too-long litany of incompetence, piss-poor judgment and lethal bureaucratic inertia, this reader bowed his head and fought twin temptations. One, to scream in frustration that Pentagon apparatchiks saw only business as usual while great young Americans were being killed and maimed in Iraq with increasing severity and frequency. And, two, to cry in grief for the lives that were lost or maimed when so many of these deaths and horrible injuries could have – and should have – been prevented.
Unfortunately, preventing a goodly number of these casualties would have required that some senior Army or DoD official – just one – truly cared more for the welfare of the troops than for the proper staffing of some piece of paper. It's brutally obvious that proper staffing "within" the DoD acquisition system was the be-all and end-all that overrode every other consideration.
It did not and does not have to be this way. During the Falklands War in the spring of 1982, then-Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger faced the same bureaucracy while trying to support our British allies in their fight to prevent the Argentine junta from annexing their islands in the South Atlantic following the invasion.
Weinberger's response to the "most-urgent" British requests for U.S. materiel assistance was instructive: He ignored the DoD acquisition system altogether! Over the strong protests of the bureaucrats, Weinberger short-circuited the materiel mafia that continues to force U.S. troops to rely on "process and procedure" to the detriment of getting their hands on live-saving equipment in a timely fashion.
Weinberger's solution was brilliantly simple. At least once a day, he and his British counterpart in the Ministry of Defense had a secure telephone call. The British "SecDef" told his American counterpart what the Brit forces needed, and Weinberger issued an order for the DoD acquisition system to provide the specified items. The only "staffing" was the execute order!
For example, the Brits most urgently needed the best air-to-air missiles that the United States had – the AIM-9L Sidewinder.
To no surprise, our own admirals protested, and may have actually succeeded in "hiding" some of the requested Sidewinders. In spite of this obstructionism, enough AIM-9Ls were transferred to U.K. forces to enable the British Harrier jump-jets to protect their fleet with minimal losses.
Please note that no U.S. troops were at risk in this British-Argentine shoot 'em up. Nonetheless, Weinberger ignored the bureaucratic niceties (and maybe a legal stricture or two in the Federal Acquisition Regulations).
The moral of this too-long sea story, is that if SecDef Donald Rumsfeld and the closed circle of high-level hand puppets that surround him had truly given even half of a damn about the welfare of our troops in harm's way, he and his lackeys had both the Weinberger precedent and power at their disposal to have ensured that body armor and up-armored vehicles got to our troops in Iraq in sufficient amounts and in time to have saved lives and limbs.
That this did not happen is a major indictment of the Pentagon's current leadership.
To date, no one has been fired, or even reprimanded for the armor-shortage scandal. No doubt, many of the uniformed and civilian leaders on whose watch this disgrace occurred have subsequently been promoted (and the higher-level career civilians inside the acquisition machine have I'm sure received their annual performance bonuses for "exceptional" performance in both 2003 and 2004.
The ugly truth is that they all chose by inaction and failure to use all the tools available to them, to let stout-hearted Americans needlessly die and be maimed for life. How they as individuals can live with the consequences of their dereliction of duty is a matter for them and their consciences.
For what it's worth, they have earned my complete and utter contempt.
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