The New York Times has an article today investigating the unconscionable lack of body armor for US troops serving in Iraq: International > Middle East > Missing in Action: The Supply Gap in Iraq: Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/07/international/middleeast/07armor.html?hp&ex=1110258000&en=4c8f9c351e1cfaa3&ei=5094&partner=homepage”>Missing in Action: The Supply Gap in Iraq: Many Missteps Tied to Delay in Armor for Troops in Iraq.
If you’ll remember, Donald Rumsfeld told troops in December that the government was making armor as fast as it could, and it was only a matter of physics that explained why they weren’t getting it. Well, people called Bullshit then, and it still sticks. The problem? Miscommunication and supply fuckups, of course.
The war in Iraq was hardly a month old in April 2003 when an Army general in charge of equipping soldiers with protective gear threw the brakes on buying bulletproof vests.
The general, Richard A. Cody, who led a Pentagon group called the Army Strategic Planning Board, had been told by supply chiefs that the combat troops already had all the armor they needed, according to Army officials and records from the board’s meetings. Some 50,000 other American soldiers, who were not on the front lines of battle, could do without.
Once the error was discovered, the general ordered the budget office to buy all the bulletproof vests it could. However,
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 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.
I particularly like this section:
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 late.
You know that apologizers for the Bush administration will claim that the US military is a vast bureaucratic machine, but this goes beyond poor paperwork. This is rank incompetence, and Rumsfeld and everyone involved should have been spending nights getting this fixed.
It boggles my mind that people still can’t get the message: this administration does not care about you (unless you’re a wealthy business owner). Its idea of “supporting the troops” is to put them in harm’s way without the protection they need, and then reduce veterans’ benefits when they come home wounded.
Jeff Carlson | Never Enough Coffee Creations 