In earlier wars, failures to supply troops were the basis of scandals. Shouldn’t they be now? From yesterday’s New York Times:
Hundreds of United States marines may have been killed or wounded by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps officials refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.
The study, written by a civilian Marine Corps official, accuses the service of “gross mismanagement” in delaying the deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.
Maj. Manuel Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman, called the study “predecisional staff work” and said it would be inappropriate to comment on it.
Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the vehicles, known as MRAPs, according to the study. Authorities in the United States saw the vehicles, which can cost as much as $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded.
After Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates declared the MRAP the Pentagon’s No. 1 acquisition priority in May 2007, the trucks began to be shipped to Iraq in large quantities.
The vehicles weigh as much as 40 tons and have been effective at protecting American forces from roadside bombs, the weapon of choice for Iraqi insurgents. Only four American service members have been killed by such bombs while riding in MRAPs; three of those deaths occurred in older versions of the vehicles.
The study’s author, Franz J. Gayl, catalogs what he says were flawed decisions and missteps by midlevel managers in the Marines that occurred well before Mr. Gates replaced Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2006.
Mr. Gayl, the science and technology adviser to Lt. Gen. Richard F. Natonski, has clashed with his superiors in the past and filed for whistle-blower protection last year.
Among its findings, the Jan. 22 study concluded that budget and procurement managers failed to recognize the damage being done by roadside bombs in late 2004 and early 2005, and were convinced that the best solution was adding more armor to Humvees. Humvees, even with extra layers of steel, proved incapable of blunting the powerful explosives used by insurgents.
The study also found that an urgent February 2005 request for MRAPs got lost in bureaucracy. It was signed by Brig. Gen. Dennis J. Hejlik, who asked for 1,169 of them. The Marines could not continue to take “serious and grave casualties” caused by roadside bombs when a solution was commercially available, wrote General Hejlik, who was a commander in western Iraq from June 2004 to February 2005, and who has since been promoted to major general.
Mr. Gayl cites documents showing General Hejlik’s request was shuttled to a civilian logistics official at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in suburban Washington who had little experience with military vehicles. As a result, there was more concern over how the MRAP would upset the Marines’ supply and maintenance chains than there was in getting the troops a truck that would keep them alive, the study contends.
The study says Gen. James T. Conway, the Marine Corps commandant, was not told of the gravity of General Hejlik’s request and the real reasons it was shelved. That resulted in General Conway giving “inaccurate and incomplete” information to Congress about why buying MRAPs was not forcefully pursued.
The Combat Development Command, which decides what gear to buy, treated the MRAP as an expensive obstacle to long-range plans for equipment that was more mobile and fit into the Marines Corps’ vision as a rapid reaction force, the study said.
Mr. Gayl writes that “if the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005” in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time “hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented.”
“Study Faults Delay of Armored Trucks to Iraq,” The New York Times , 17 February 2008.