I must say the capacity for disingenuity manifested by our repugnant dopers is astonishing.
I really thought that the 107,000 dollar excuse was so over the top that no one could miss the metacommunication from the brass:
“grunts, you are lower than dogshit–we care so little about your welfare we won’t even spend pocket change to further an armor program”
Don’t you repug morons see that however the "tradeoffs"are to be managed, a multi-year slowdown was imposed because in the midst of a THREE HUNDRED BILLION DOLLAR WAR there was a problem having one branch of the government promise to pay another branch (whatever the fuck THAT means) $107,000, or , in clearer terms, 3.3 x 10 to the minus 5 percent of the war total.)
Stop blowing smoke up our asses with the tradeoff bullshit. The pentagon didn’teven bother to inform itself about the parameters to be traded, you assholes.
(gee, I kind of like it here in the pit–I should visit more often.)
Are y’all really surprised by the responses to this OP? The republicans on this board don’t care about casualties or deaths. Well, I should say the right wing idiots on this board. The republican administration can do no wrong. If the troops have no armor so be it!
It wasn’t in the 6 billion dollars a month budget.
Well, reductio my cheap ass ab absurdum. Step outside your hotel, and BUY a fucking paper, you moron.
you sniveling piece of shit, how dare you post without reading the underlying article,and then go into your patented “maybe it’s this maybe it’s that routine.”?
What cracks me up is how SHAMELESS the pentagon is.I mean, you have guys scrounging in dumps in Iraq, you have families scraping together the thousands of dollars that the good stuff costs (funny, you can buy that on the open market if you have the bucks…no procurement problem here. It’s a triumph of free market capitalism…I think…)
You’ld think the first time some mother sold her ass on hollywood blvd to buy armor for her marine son the problem would get solved, but oh no.
Let mommy sell that cuchi, if she wants sonny home in one piece…
The bureaucracy dragged its feet on this issue. Top brass (and their civilian Commanders) could have intervened, but I see little evidence that they tried.
There’s a pattern here: strategy is fun while implementation is dull. Rumsfeld, Bush and Wolfowitz are visionaries, not detail-men. Unfortunately, when the wonks point out the need for post-invasion planning or better armor for troops and trucks or expedited training of the Iraqi army – all necessary components of a successful counter-insurgency program – they are met with limited enthusiasm and follow-up.
Indeed, in the case of post-invasion planning there was active high-level sabotage, since it was believed that such studies could undermine the case for war.
I think this is the fundamental problem here. This administration did not expect a long drawn out occupation and did not plan for it. Even as it became more and more apparent that we were in for a multi-year occupation with frequent attacks on troops this administration did not respond to that. We went to war in what mid-2003? You’re (not you Measure) telling me that the most industrialized nation in the world couldn’t armor some freaking trucks and procured some armor in two and a half years? After a few months it was clear that we were in for a pretty long occupation. If Bush had said “we need to armor these Hum-Vees and get the troops body armor now, do whatever you have to do but get it done now” that the hum-vees couldn’t have been armored and body armor given to the troops in 6 months? I don’t buy it for a second.
Let’s take a look at what happens, courtesy of the NYT article.
Example:
There’s a new vehicle in the works called the Cougar, whose V-shaped hull helps deflect roadside bombs. Alas, production is behind schedule.
Who is building it? The Pentagon awarded the contract to a small company in South Carolina named Force Protection. The company’s prototypes have been recalled from Iraq due to faulty transmissions. Steel has been miscut. Several managers have resigned. The company is being sued for falsifying records to cover up defective workmanship.
This is the first vehicle that Force Protection has ever mass-produced. Ever. So I guess some teething problems are understandable.
Still, the partial reimbursement program is not as generous as Senator Dodd would have liked: it will not cover gun scopes or Humvee protection for example.
This is obviously true of the military, but was just as true of apparently any phase of this fucked up operation. Just remember, we picked resumes of 20 somethings off the Heritage Foundation website to run the CPA.
I’ve stopped wondering what it will take for the apologists to stop being apologists. My feeling now is fuck them and move on. They are worthless and will never stop apologizing, no matter what. The only time they will stop apologizing for Bush is when there is another Republican president.
I can’t speak for body armor, but I can say that the company doing the Hum-Vee armor probably wasn’t even at full capacity by six months. Composite tooling tends to be a fairly slow process, in my experience, even when it’s important.
You might have a legitimate bitch if you can demonstrate that the military had effective body armor in, say, Sarajevo or Somalia, and that the Republican Congress has since cut the funding for it.
As for you, my bombastic friend, I don’t really see how that NYT story you gave us shows that any of this can be laid at the feet of the Republican Party, or the Whitehouse, or Congress. Looks to me like a procurement issue wholly contained in the Pentagon. Procurement issues in the Pentagon aren’t something new; people - on both sides of the aisle, as well as the non-partisian CBO and GAO - have been pointing to problems with Pentagon procurement procedures for as long as military procurement has been centralized.
And I’m very certain that if the Whitehouse had ordered the Pentagon to circumvent its established procurement procedures to expedite acquisition of body armor, you and your ilk would be screaming about that, too. So, what the fuck, Chicken Little? Pretty easy to cry wolf; not so much so to actually shoot the big bad fucker, eh?
You might also read the related story attached in the sidebar of your NYT article. It says:
Again, this points to a problem with Pentagon procurement, not something the Republicans (or Democrats, or the Whitehouse, or Congress, or the fucking bullet fairy) are stalling.
Unofrtunately, not exactly. We could build hundreds of liberty ships and thousands of tanks. But nowadays we demand infintely more from each supplier and from each item. It must be vetted by insane numbers of bureaucrats, many of whom have little relevant experience or knowledge. There are vast numbers of technical reports, financial analyses, and other documents to be created and filed.
In short, the Pentagon is a what it is: a massive, opaque bureaucracy. Frankly, I’m amazed it does this well at adapting. Moving money isn’t the issue. It’s simply that there’s so much information being transmitted so slowly.
And of course, if anything’s not perfect, we fix it until it is. Witness the vihicle program mentioned above. If the Sherman tank had a flaw, soldiers dealt with it as best they could and moved on. They didn’t send it back. Now we do, because it’s politically unacceptable to have anything less than perfect. End result? Fewer goodies, higher costs.
I think you missed my point. I have a legitimate bitch if it is true that additional body armor would save lives and could be provided, and the counter argument is “But I was in the military and I didn’t get body armor.”