http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/01/opinion/01sun2.html?ore than two years after the invasion of Iraq, American soldiers are still needlessly dying or suffering grievous injuries because of the Pentagon's inexcusable slowness in protecting their Humvees and trucks with adequate armor. It's a problem that the troops in the field have been vocally complaining about for a long time, and one that briefly made headlines when a National Guard soldier confronted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Kuwait last December. Yet, despite accelerated efforts since that time, it is far from solved. Perhaps the Pentagon needs to divert some money and effort from those exotic weapons systems for the future that defense contractors prefer, and save the lives and limbs of the troops it sends into battle today.
Times readers reacted with understandable shock and anger last week when they learned some of the details of these preventable deaths in a searing investigation by Michael Moss, who interviewed members of a recently returned Marine Corps company. The Army is having even bigger problems than the Marines in getting its much larger number of Humvees and trucks adequately armored. And lengthy delays in providing both services with enough body armor have cost additional lives. Public outrage would doubtless be even greater if the Pentagon offered more candid information to relatives about those who died as a direct result of these shortages, instead of merely reporting them killed in action. Those details are painful, but might serve as a quicker, sharper spur to corrective action.
The roots of this problem lie in the Bush administration's stubborn self-delusion about the reception American troops were likely to face in Iraq. Then it took the Pentagon many months to acknowledge that it was facing a determined long-term insurgency, not just a clutch of desperate holdouts from Saddam Hussein's inner circle. By the time reality started sinking in during the early months of 2004, the insurgents were on a fast learning curve that Washington has been trying to catch up with ever since. Insurgents' tactics keep growing more sophisticated and their firepower more intense. As a result, American units in the field have discovered that even their armored Humvees must now be refitted with stronger armor to protect against the increasingly lethal improvised explosive devices that have become this war's signature weapon.
A crash program now under way should deliver enough of these reinforced Humvees to equip all Marine Corps units in Iraq by the end of this year. For some marines, that won't be soon enough.
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