For the first time, the study by the military’s medical examiner shows the cost in lives from inadequate armor, even as the Pentagon continues to publicly defend its protection of the troops…
The vulnerability of the military’s body armor has been known since the start of the war,… the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until September…
The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase.
REPUBLICANS!!
As you are fond of saying,
YOU WON!!
You won the White House. You hold both houses.
What is your major malfunction?
Why can’t you buy some fucking body armor that works you corrupt venal scumsucke–( ooops–don’t want a ticket to the pit, now, do we?)
For debate:
How can a party that is so miserably incompetent and cavalier in protecting our troops have the nerve to ask for a single vote ever again?
Please explain how a failure this glaring ought not disqualify anyone who ever came within six degrees of a republican?.
( Note that the committee in the house that handles this sort if thing is Duke Cunningham’s–corruption in building levees is bad enough, but screwing around with the body armor contracts (just a surmise…) really STINKS.)
“The Marine Corps said it asked for the data in August 2004; but it needed to pay the medical examiner $107,000 to have the data analyzed. Marine officials said financing and other delays had resulted in the study’s not starting until December 2004. It finally began receiving the information by June 2005.”
well, there you have it.
that cash flow is a real bitch. When you need 107 large, sometimes it takes a while to raise it!!!
After all, it’s not like they can just print money, or something…
assumes that the body armor that is being used right now is crap. Well, it isn’t. To the best of my knowledge, there isn’t a body armor in the world right now which will stop an AKM round. And the schrapnel wounds that are stopped by this armor would also be stopped by the obsolete “Armory, Body, Fragmentation” that was issued back in Vietnam.
But also consider this. The current issue body armor, with its single large four layer ceramic chicken plate on the front and back, plus heavy kevlar weave for the rest of it, weighs sixteen (16) pounds. It’s hot, it’s heavy, and it limits mobility. A vest with 100% more ceramic plating (say, slightly oversized shoulders, a modular neck pad, and smaller cells for the sides) would weigh twice as much. A large number of the guys I was over there with (myself included) didn’t wear it simply because it was too cumbersome.
The body armor issue won’t be solved until somebody figures out a new matereal to make this out of, because plated armor just doesn’t work well.
What a maroon. We could also issue each soldier an M1A1 tank. That would protect them against nearly everything short of tactical nukes.
Armor, whether personal or for a vehicle, is the result of compromises. How much does it weigh, does it restrict movement, does it cause heat stress, how much does it cost, what is the threat, etc.
My company supplies a company that makes armor for vehicles.
We make a nice product, but there is no way in hell it should be used for vehicle armor. There is no way in hell the company we supply should be making armor they way they are making it.
It’s better than nothing, mind you, but the specs are ridiculous. I assume that the body armor is similar. Better than nothing, but worse than it should be.
Basically what mks57 said…life is full of tradeoffs. I was never a ground pounder mind you, but my son is a Marine and he tells me that the stuff is heavy and uncomfortable…and this is the OLD body armor. The new stuff is most likely even heavier and more cumbersom, unless they have come up with a radical new armor that offers more protection, greater movement but weighs less. If so…how long has it been out? How much does it cost? How available is it for procurement in large quantities? Has it been field tested?
I know you are assuming this and don’t really know, but it cuts to the heart of the OP so I’d like HIM to prove this claim. IS the new generation of armor that much better at protecting individual soldiers? How long has it been available…and how much does it cost compared to the armor already in the inventory? How much more protection does it really give a soldier? Are there any extrapolations on how many of those killed in Iraq would/could have actually been saved if they had the new armor vs the old? Is the new armor about the same weight/encumberance or is it lighter? Heavier? Is there a rational reason why the 'Republican’s have blocked purchasing of this armor (assuming they have)…or is it just because they are evil?
Two things. First off I should have mentioned that for whatever reason the network I’m on blocks The New York Times web site (but interestingly enough the filter lets this message board through…gods know what fucked up filtering they are using). So, if all is answered in the linked article my appologies…I won’t be able to read it until tonight in my hotel room (which is unfiltered).
Why don’t you read the article before defending Bush and telling me to calm down. Being pissed off about this is the right response and I am suprised more people aren’t around here.
This is the epitome of the Republican response to this whole situation in Iraq. “Life is full of trade-offs. You people, you trade off your sons and daughters so that we can wrap ourselves in the flag.” We love the military, in the abstract. We support them by putting a little yellow magnetic ribbon on the back of our cars. Spending money to support the military? Not so much.
Life is full of trade-offs, indeed. Pathetic and sad.
Go fsck yourself. I used to be in a light infantry unit. We didn’t get any body armor, other than a helmet. How many of you Republican bashers have ever spent a day in uniform?
Some people forget that the mission of the armed forces is not “take no casualties”. You try to minimize casualties, but the priority is the mission.
My concern is that these compromises have been evaluated at glacial speed. Upper management should have knocked several heads together when this problem became apparent in 2003.
Here’s the lead sentence from the NYT’s article:
“A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection…”
This is not mere armchair posturing. This is a systematic refusal to provide infantry with the sort of tools that they have repeatedly called for.
Ah, another conservative classic: “I suffered, so others should too.” Why don’t you guys ever think “I suffered, so I should try to make sure others don’t.”
Plenty of “Republican bashers” have served. Rep. Murtha is a great recent example. Didn’t stop pig fucker Republicans from trying to smear him, too.
Cheap appeals to emotion and straw man arguments don’t do shit against the overwhelming incompentancy of the military and this administration. March 2003 the military’s medical examiner says the information about soldier’s deaths in Iraq “screams to be published.” It takes the Marine Corps five fucking months after that statement to request the study. If thats not bad enough even when they request it the study isn’t done for another four months. Want to know why? Becuase they couldn’t find a measely 100,000 dollars to pay for it. One hundred fucking thousand dollars.
So they finally get around their sheer incompetence to finally get a study done on how Marines were dying and what they could do to stop it. What they found suggests that 300 American Soldiers that died in the war could have been saved by increased body armor. Thats fifteen fucking percent of the casualities. Thats just from body armor. Body armor that the troops know they need becuase they have been buying it for themselves and using crotch protectors as an ad hoc substitute. What about all the vehicles that still aren’t armored? How many deaths could have been prevented from that armor? Its nothing but from sheer incompetence in this administration that the greatest industrial nation in the world still hasn’t managed to armor some fucking Hum-Vees after 2 years.
AFAIK, Dubya wasn’t wearing any body armor when he recently suffered his combat wound while clearing brush at his fake ranch, so I’m sure he can relate to the difficulties faced by the troops in Iraq.
