Where’s my MRAP?
That is what soldiers with boots on the ground have been asking… for years.
From DefenseNews.com:
[M]ilitary officials repeatedly balked at appeals — from commanders on the battlefield and from the Pentagon’s own staff — to provide the life-saving Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle, or MRAP, for patrols and combat missions, USA TODAY found.
In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates late last month, two U.S. senators said the delays cost the lives of an estimated “621 to 742 Americans” who would have survived explosions had they been in MRAPs, rather than Humvees. The letter, from Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., assumed the initial calls for MRAPs came in February 2005, when Marines in Iraq asked for almost 1,200 of the vehicles.
USA Today found that the first appeals for the MRAP came much earlier. As early as December 2003, Pentagon analysts sent detailed information about the superiority of MRAP vehicles to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, e-mails obtained by the newspaper show.
Later pleas came from Iraq, where commanders saw that the approach the Joint Chiefs embraced in the fall of 2003 — adding armor to the sides of Humvees, the standard vehicles in the war zone — did little to protect against blasts beneath their vehicles.
The best part of the article is an excerpt of an email from a Lt. Col. named Jim Hampton to his wife:
Hampton, opposed to up-armoring the Humvees, warned his superiors, he says. He even e-mailed his wife from Iraq. “Hey Babe,” his e-mail read. “Just a little aggravated with the bureaucracy. … I sure hope no one gets wasted before the powers-that-be get off their collective fat asses.”
Too late for that.
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