“One excellent way to show your concern for wounded veterans is not to make so many of them,” noted The New York Times in an editorial yesterday. The Times was praising the appointment of General Eric Shinseki to head the Department of Veteran’s affairs. But meanwhile, another national paper was concerned with another lumbering bureaucracy—the one that supplies the veterans-to-be.
On Monday, USA Today got hold of a Pentagon Inspector General’s report explaining that, before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Department of Defense knew that roadside “Improvised Explosive Devices” (IEDs) were a major threat to troops in the field. The Department also knew about a class of vehicles—Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) trucks—most likely to defend soldiers from this threat. But the Department didn’t fund the MRAPs, and even balked at urgent requests for them from commanders facing mounting casualties from IEDs—which have since become the number one killer of US troops in Iraq.
The Pentagon report was a response to a damning investigation by Marine science advisor Franz Gayl, which USA Today’s Peter Eisler and Tom Vanden Brook wrote about in February. Gayl made the astonishing claim that 700 US troops had died needlessly in IED attacks because the Marine Corps had delayed acquisition of MRAP vehicles. Because MRAP trucks sit high on V-shaped hulls, they can deflect the blast of buried bombs that explode under the vehicles. Armored Humvees are protected only on the sides, and they sit lower, closer to the impact of buried bombs. Insurgents took heed even if the Defense Department didn’t—buried bombs became much more prevalent on Iraq’s roads as the insurgency grew.
The reports by Gayl and the Pentagon Inspector General officially ratify concerns USA Today had raised publicly since at least 2007. It was USA Today’s Vanden Brook who, in April 2007, reported that not a single Marine had died in more than 300 IED attacks on MRAPs in Anbar province in 2006. (The Marines then had about 100 such vehicles in Anbar province, used primarily in bomb disarming missions, and wanted 3,000 more.)
The Marines did not release the number of deaths involving Humvees, but Vanden Brook reported an average of less than one injury per attack on an MRAP, versus an average of two injuries, including deaths, in attacks on other vehicles. At the time, the Pentagon’s own records showed that IED attacks were responsible for 70 percent of U.S. casualties in Iraq. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, then only four months into his tenure, noticed the report and declared the MRAP a top Pentagon priority at a news conference in May 2007.
USA Today followed up that July with an eight-reporter investigation into what military leaders had been doing with well-known information about the MRAPs’ superior safety record before Gates embraced the vehicle. The answer, it turned out, was not much. The paper catalogued reports dating back to 2003 on the MRAP, and concerns about armored Humvees, all of which “went up the chain of command and withered.” In one example, Marine officials stopped processing an early 2005 request for more of the vehicles from a Marine commander in Anbar province, then the seat of the insurgency. The commander wrote that the Marines “cannot continue to lose … serious and grave casualties to IED … at current rates when a commercial off the shelf capability exists to mitigate” them.
The Pentagon had other budget priorities, and, besides, no one expected the war to last much longer. By May 2005, Dick Cheney was ready to declare the insurgency “in its last throes,” the paper pointed out.
There should be a case study of military education to determine why the graduates are so inflexible. There is little if any evidence at the West Point Internet site that the military works well on plasticity of orientation and adaptation. If "Class 11" holds, military training inculcates the rigidity that would make the failure to orient to MRAP just about certain, often.
It is a curious psychological issue, why West Point cannot exploit all the resources of linguistics, literature, and psychology to generate recursive thinking that would rapidly wrap around such an issue as MRAP.
They are wrapped into ineluctable assembly line style strategic conceptualization. They cannot see any connection between micro- and macro-cohesion and coherence. If they took "The Sick Rose" apart and reassembled it, they would never ask about the asymmetry of /z/ and /s/.
Why is this lyric weighted so heavily to the left with /z/? To the right with /s/? What is the graphic relationship between "Rose" and "destroy"? Is this chiasmus systematic in the poem?
If we do not believe in language, psychology, or literature, we will not be able to MRAP our minds around the issues. We are still waiting for the National Intelligence University.
The Mind Resistant Ambush Protected version.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Wed 10 Dec 2008 at 10:23 PM
Clayton, you might have noticed that the article pointed out that the managing branch for the MRAP anti-IED program was the Marine Corps. Marine officers do not come from West Point. If you had any real knowledge of the US armed forces and how they work, you might have already known that. They certainly have more important things to worry about than poetry. In general, the above article shows similar ignorance. Perhaps if there was a ROTC program at Columbia, you might enjoy a familiarity with the men and women who put their lives on the line for you and your country.
Posted by Jonathan Baum on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 03:51 AM
The report cited is seriously flawed. There was no such vehicle as the MRAP in 2003, even if there was, a GAO report released in about 2005-06 noted that it took 2 years for material manufactures, vehicle manufactures and congress to act on making better vehicles for the troops. The report pointed out thhere were not enough material manufactures in the US, because contracts state "US made material", to fill any order faster.
Let's say there was knowledge about this in 2003, according to the GAO it took 2 years for the "red tape", it takes another 6 months for a vehicle to get from the manufacture to the field, this would put the first MRAP vehicles in the field around the last have of 2005. I believe the first MRAP was deployed a year after this.
Summarize: If this report was accurate, we lost 1 year without MRAP in theater. Granted that one year represents a bunch of injuries and deaths, but it is not that long if you consider how our government and regulations work.
Look at the time line, this is not a "break through" report.
Posted by Debunking Thestory on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 11:55 AM
Thanks for writing. I wish I knew more about the ins and outs of military procurement. USA Today claims, however, that MRAPs were first developed in the '70s in Rhodesia and South Africa. Also, as I understand it (and again according to USA Today), the "urgent needs request" from Anbar in 2005 referred to "commercially available equipment." The request was shelved
for 15 months, until it was made again directly to the Joint Chiefs, that time successfully. A 2007 report by the Naval Audit Service pointed out that the Marine Corps Combat Development Command had serious flaws in their handling of urgent needs requests, but noted that the process was improving. (That report, too, was criticized.)
I think the question USAT raised this week is whether, given the known threat from IEDs and the known best protection from them, steps should and could have been taken for funding and procurement in the planning stages of the 2003 invasion, perhaps especially given the built-in procurement delays you justly point out. With the extreme benefit of hindsight, and never having served in the armed forces, I would guess the answer is yes.
Posted by Kathy Gilsinan on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 12:50 PM
Jonathan, That you are so dismissive just proves what I am trying to tell you. Clearly, if we were to offer as an example the points that Tim Weiner makes about the National Intelligence University, in the afterword of the paperback version of his "Legacy of Ashes" (600), the implications would be system-wide. If you had read "Class 11" carefully, you would have noted the many references to the military, and integration of same into CIA training programs.
In "Terror and Consent," Philip Bobbitt indicates that someday we will have schools of intelligence, just as we now have schools of business, in universities. I have asked Michael Ignatieff about the need for doctorates in intelligence at Oxford, MIT, Columbia, Stanford, ANU, and Waterloo. He was not aware of any substantial PhD programs purely in intelligence. CSIS has indicated to me that far more effective school and university programs would help tighten its training cycles and help provide the intellectual plasticity the organization values.
I am a Canadian. I do realize that American soldiers are fighting on behalf of Canadians as well. However, we could help you more effectively if our airports were not so infiltrated by gangs, and if we had powerful MI5-like internal security (with none of the limitations of same), and a fully functioning CIA-like international intelligence capacity (with none of the limitations of same), well integrated on the basis of the subtle strategic legal proposals in "Terror and Consent." (A book that does not scorn poetry). Could I ask if you have read Bobbitt' s book?
I agree that America protects the world. I do not ever want to live under a fundamentalist regime. Given that Canadians are friends of Americans, I do not see why our reasonable advice should be rejected. I would be willing to listen to your suggestions about how education and training for Marine officers could be improved.
Thanks for your comment. Clayton.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 02:25 PM
Universities (for example, for International Relations students at the University of Virginia), training academies--FBI, Marines, and DEA at Quantico--and government operations in Virginia such as the CIA and the Pentagon should institute an official state media reading cycle for the first of January.
If students could be motivated to internalize a 7 a.m. cycle of The Washington Post, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, New York Times, Australian, Globe and Mail, and Times of London in about 2 or 2 1/2 hours, so that they would become far more skilled at memory, perception, information coherence, orientation, and adaptation, the benefits would be dramatic. Physically and psychologically, this is a hard cycle for the first few months, but once you have internalized it, it becomes easy and rewarding.
This media cycle is foundational since it imitates the patterns of information collation students need to assimilate better than Internet news. Still, later in the day, students should update with at least 20 Internet news sites from the UK, US, and Australia. They should become familiar with the time zone behavior of news, which only fully emerges after months and more of practice.
Students should write Internet media reader comment to stimulate discussions that do not just peter out rapidly. Very few intelligence students are writing systematically on the Internet so as to practise their reasoning, elicitation, and communication skills. The role of USA Today in this story is quite stunning, and tells us just how cold the traditional government sources of analysis are.
CJR should have an aggregation team to scan the world media for stories such as on cholera in Zimbabwe. The best news coverage today by far for that story is at The New York Times, by Celia W. Dugger ("Cholera Is Raging..."). The best comment is by Peter Tatchell at The Times of London. The links to stories are erratic (for example, NYT linked to an analysis at The Times of London today where typically the video was unavailable to Vancouver). The aggregation generally at such sites as The Daily Beast is slow, does not deal well with time zones, and does not represent a careful consideration of the quality of news writing and commentary.
A "Why Breaking?" aggregator at CJR could be far more powerful, and provide a kind of natural housing for incoming Twitter comment. It would also be an excellent tool for schools. A live Geography curriculum could employ--Why Breaking?--and add value by feedbacking to CJR.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Thu 11 Dec 2008 at 09:53 PM
My son called me today from Iraq and told me his MRAP had been hit by an IED. The truck is destroyed but the 2.5 million dollar investment inside are all ok. Whatever the reason for it taking so long, at least they finally equipped these men and I still have a son.
Posted by Judy on Fri 12 Dec 2008 at 08:16 PM
Hi there. Responding to "Debunking Theory," who writes:
"Let's say there was knowledge about this in 2003, according to the GAO it took 2 years for the "red tape", it takes another 6 months for a vehicle to get from the manufacture to the field, this would put the first MRAP vehicles in the field around the last have of 2005. I believe the first MRAP was deployed a year after this."
I was in Iraq driving an MRAP as a combat engineer with the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005. This particular MRAP, called a Husky, was in Iraq before our arrival. Our units HUSKY survived one IED attack and a direct hit from a landmine with no casualties. Another unit stationed on our base had a heavily armored vehicle called a Buffalo, specifically designed to protect its crew while searching for explosives. This vehicle could also fall into the MRAP category.
So, "Debunking Theory," I'm sorry to tell you that DoD had the technology available long before 2007, they just didn't want to buy it for us in sufficient numbers to protect us. DoD preferred instead to spend its money outfitting its brigades of private contractors with brand new pickups and SUVs, paying those same civilians four to five times as much as soldiers, not to mention giving free reign to horrendously wasteful (probably corrupt) reconstruction projects that were never effective.
The fact of the matter is this: the U.S. government did not provide us with a strategy for victory, nor did the DoD give us the troop numbers necessary to maintain order after the fall of Saddam Hussein. As a soldier, I do not blame the government for sending me to war (though I did not agree with their decision)—but I will never forgive the Bush administration for sending us to war without a plan. For all of the "support the troops" mumbo jumbo one hears bandied about, there is suspiciously little question of what that phrase actually means. When it comes to DoD's part and the Bush administration's part, real support—in the form of meticulously planned tactics, long range strategy, appropriate training and adequate materiel—we soldiers received scant support at best.
Posted by Elliott Woods on Mon 15 Dec 2008 at 01:09 PM
"Debunking Thestory" could easily have read this paragraph, if that person had clicked through the links:
The Pentagon "was aware of the threat posed by mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) … and of the availability of mine resistant vehicles years before insurgent actions began in Iraq in 2003," says the 72-page report, which was reviewed by USA TODAY.
Debunking's obvious mistakes have been up on this site for days. Also, there is nothing in my previous comment to justify Jonathan's assumptions.
Elliott D. Woods of the University of Virginia should lead a review of pathologies of the Marine chain of command that could be remediated by a different style of information flow. That USA Today reported so brilliantly means that an 8 print newspaper reading cycle at 6 a.m. is foundational. It is remarkable for spatial and temporal plasticity and pattern recognition, if you can fully internalize the cycle. Doing so is hard work, taking months.
It seems that university administrators and those in military command have trouble understanding what this internalization means, or it would be routine, in IR, for example. That West Point psychologists have not come up with the formula to inculcate the cycle is surprising. USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times, Times of London, Financial Times, Globe and Mail, and The Australian. If you can absorb the papers continually, for months and months, in about 2 1/2 hours, building measurable speed and accuracy, you can enhance your powers of concentration fourfold, but only if you really mean business.
Often media patterns are latent. If we were to study pathologies in the chain of command, we would want to work on the De Menezes case in the UK, where lack of precision in intake of information, noise in the channels, and inability to collate sources came together in a needless death. If you write in The Independent that London could benefit from PowerPhone, Inc. (Madison) so that camera phone images could be shared with emergency services, what you hear back is usually silence. If you identify ways of sharpening listening, vocabulary, grammar, and discourse, what you hear in return is nothing, from Harvard and Cambridge.
This is the archetype of the disorder that led to the Marine Corps MRAP ineptitude: the failure of orientation now pandemic. The purpose of the print media cycle, of Internet follow up, and of absorbing reasonably difficult books such as "Terror and Consent," is that you will develop the information adaptation. Attention and perception. Orientation to higher-order cognitive skills.
In bookstore Biology and Psychology sections you will find texts such as "In Search of Memory," by Eric R. Kandel, and many other powerful ones in cognitive science. Yet we fail to integrate Kandel with Proust or "Legacy of Ashes" with "Tree of Smoke" to link back to our media cycle and forward to "Terror and Consent."
If Elliott D. Woods of the University of Virginia "has an uncanny combination of rigor and compassion, of analytical acuity and poetic empathy," as English professor Jennifer A. Wicke, Woods' academic adviser, said, then he should be able to understand the implications of the statements of Canadian Brig-Gen. Denis Thompson, commander of NATO forces in Kandahar province: "You can't build a vehicle big enough to defend against every IED that's out there," Thompson said. "There isn't really a technical solution. The solution is to get at the IED network, to get at the people who plant these bombs." (The Province).
Canada has been extremely unlucky recently with IED deaths. Shouldn't Canada insist on MRAP-style vehicles from the US as a condition of continuing IED patrols? If instead Canadians try to make excuses, as it might seem, what does that say about our fitness as strategic partners in North American defense?
This is a recent report in the Toronto Sun on security in major Canadian airports:
Project Spawn examined Canada's eight largest international airports from 2005 to 2007 and discovered 58 criminal gangs operating inside the supposedly secure walls.
Even if one such fact is a clue to the meaning of another, analysts maintain a rigid silence.
The Marine Corps University should institute PhD programs as soon as possible. There is far too much master's level work going on in security and intelligence. The Marine Corps needs to ask tough questions to officer candidates about reading comprehension. No multiple choice, please.
Posted by Clayton Burns on Mon 15 Dec 2008 at 05:01 PM