Thursday, February 15, 2007

IraQ: More on Military Ineptitude


ABC News
Reports:

Marines will Buy Tougher Armored Vehicles for Iraq>


Marine Corps hopes to replace all its 3,700 Humvees in Iraq, but it will take until 2009...More later...Until then, the Marines will have to make do with the more vulnerable armored Humvees available to them now.
BUT...
In testimony before congress on TUESDAY, the Army's chief of staff, told the House Armed Services Committee Tuesday that when the war in Iraq started in 2003, the United States had only 253 armored Humvees in its inventory of 80,000 Humvees.

Emphasis added!!
Humvees were primarily designed to be lightweight mobile vehicles, so it was decided that only a small number of the vehicles would need armored protection, specifically military police vehicles. Schoomaker has said recently that the Army entered the war in Iraq "flat-footed," specifically because there was such a low inventory of armored Humvees.


ARMY trying to upgrade
Since the spring {of 2006}, the Army has been quietly outfitting its 14,000 Humvees in Iraq with the most advanced version of the up-armored protection currently available, the FRAG Kit 5. Attached to the sides of Humvees, these kits provide greater side-blast protection than previous armored kits, particularly against the dangerous EFPs, Explosively Formed Projectiles, which have {ALLEGEDLY} been smuggled in from Iran.
** See **NOTE Below
Army officials acknowledge that it will be June {2007} before all its Humvees in Iraq are outfitted with the FRAG kit5 armor kits but say that will be just in time for when all the surge troops to have arrived in Iraq.
The new hull-armored "Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles" or "MRAP", have V-shaped floors that deflect the force of the blast away from the vehicles. Humvees are more vulnerable because they have flat floors that absorb the blast from roadside bombs. MRAPs are said to provide survival rates four to five times greater than do armored Humvees.

More than 700 Marines have been killed in Iraq since the war began in 2003, nearly two-thirds of them in Humvee attacks, the Pentagon said.


**Note: I am sickened that ABC news did NOT insert the WORD ALLEGEDLY into that sentence. What is Journalism in this country coming to?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I nominate the military Brass from Washington D.C. to go serve in IRAQ with the ill-equipped vehicles. They need to know first hand what a bomb exploding under their vehicle is like.