Armoring up the Humvees

[question everything]

As I was reading the story in Newsweek http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6700920/site/newsweek/ I was thinking of several questions:

1. How much does it cost to armor up a Humvee, or other vehicles? And how much will the inauguration cost? And how many millions did Bush's cronies give his campaigns? Can't they get all the beneficiaries of the tax cuts - corporations and individuals - to throw some money to pay for them? Just putting those multi-color ribbons that "support our troops" does not help them.

2. No wonder OH and FL voted for Bush, from this paragraph:

Two days after Rumsfeld's embarrassing exchange with Wilson, the Defense Department announced it was ordering 100 more up-armored Humvees a month from their main supplier, O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt in West Chester, Ohio. The Humvee armoring company had told reporters only a few days before that it was operating at 22 percent under capacity, but that there were no more orders from the Pentagon. Then suddenly there were more, for reasons the Army did not make clear. (The Pentagon claims it did not know about the additional capacity until the head of O'Gara's holding company, Armor Holdings of Jacksonville, Fla., announced last week that it was possible.) The new Pentagon order boosts production from 450 to 550 up-armored Humvees a month, neatly filling in O'Gara's capacity gap.

3. Humvees were never intended for combat, they say:

But now an Army that has long wanted to retreat from heavy, slow tanks and Bradleys, which it once designed for use against the Soviets, suddenly needs them again. "If anyone would have told me a Humvee would be the platform of choice in a war, I would have told them they're crazy," says Gary Motsek, director of support operations for Army Materiel Command. His view was echoed last week by former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who told an audience at California's Pomona College that Humvees were never intended for combat.

of course not. They were intended as a phallic symbol for the governatoer and other low-esteemed men.

[MercutioATC]

1. Answer to #1: about $150,000 each. (Humvee armor)

[whistle]

2. $40,000.00; 100 more Humvees armored up will employ...

...two workers for three months; Schwartskoft loved the Humvees for the highly mobilized blitzkrieg war of Desert Storm and Iraqi Freedom.

For a war which costs American tax payers (those unfortunate people who earn less than $250,000 annual income) $87 billion every three to four months we are not getting our money's worth. Not in combat progress, not in more jobs, not in political capital around the world. It really is the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

[radar]

3. SFTT.org...

Soldiers For The Truth has a special report with a bunch of articles about the HumVee...

http://www.sftt.org/

12-15-2004
Guest Column: Pentagon Still Spins on Humvee Armor
- By Brian T. Hart, DefenseWatch Guest Contributor

12-15-2004
Guest Column: The Humvee’s Fatal Design
- By Jim Elders, DefenseWatch Guest Contributor

12-13-2004
Steel Plates, Sandbags and ‘Trojan Horse’ Trucks
- By Philip A. Quigley, DefenseWatch Contributing Editor

12-13-2004
Posing the Right Question
- By Michael S. Woodson, DefenseWatch Contributing Editor

12-13-2004
Armor Priority? What Priority?
- By Nathaniel R. Helms, DefenseWatch Contributing Editor

...And there are more

[idiosyncratic]

4. I think *'s Christmas Card mailing cost $400,000, or was it

$600,000. That would have armored a few Humvees. :cry:

[shraby]

5. His inauguration celebration will cost

30-40 million. That's quite a bit of up-armored vehicles.

[slowroll]

6. They weren't originally intended

as a combat platform. I mean, some models were like the TOW carrier were lightly armored. But most of them were intended for the transportation of a fire team and its equipment, a replacement for the old M151 jeep.

In fact I never even saw an UPHMMWV until I went to Saudi in '00. As I understand it they were originally developed for base security units and scout platoons. No one ever expected every truck to be armored.

I'm still not sure that putting everyone in an UPHumvee is a good idea. I don't think all the British Land Rovers are armored. In fact, the British quit wearing helmets right after the major combat phase ended. Better to present a non-threatening, normalized image to the population, demilitarize the situation. And having everyone buttoned up in armored vehicles further isolates the troops, decreases their situational awareness, etc.

But, typically of this administration, it's saying one thing (that everybody's needs and is getting armor) and doing another (dragging its ass). As I said, I'm not sure it's a good idea, but we've committed to an overall strategy of armor, isolation and firepower. And we're failing to execute even that.

[question everything]

7. Maureen Dowd: Why not make it a coalition of the shilling?

Friday, December 17, 2004

Why not make it a coalition of the shilling?

Maybe the military should take a page out of NASCAR and get armor and weapons from corporate sponsors.
By Maureen Dowd

The overbearing Rummy is not used to being challenged, so he's probably still smarting from his bruising brush with reality in Kuwait.

He had surrounded himself with so many sycophantic generals that it took a grunt from Tennessee to point out that the defense secretary has no clothes -- or armor for his troops. He has taken the greatest military in the history of the world and pushed it to the breaking point.

(snip)

President Bush and Rummy should take a lesson from their own playbook and reach out to corporate America. If Rummy can't adequately supply the Army, maybe IBM and Xerox can... Picture this: a truck rumbling across the desert on the evening news, completely armored, emblazoned with golden arches. Or a fleet of Visa Humvees. You know Donald Trump would love to slap his name on a few Chinooks. The 82nd Trumpborne.

(snip)

In this day and age, when every sports arena has been hideously renamed for some corporate entity, Rummy could easily think big. How about the American Express Green Zone?

(snip)

So how about Tommy "Stop Writing Books and Finish the War" Franks, Paul "You Disbanded the Iraqi Army, Dummy" Bremer and George "Slam Dunk" Tenet taking off those preposterous medals of freedom and contributing them. Just as when Scarlett and Melanie took off their gold wedding rings for the Confederate cause, those medals can be melted down for a little Humvee armor.

With help like that and some corporate backing, Rummy could get the Army he wants and wishes to have sooner rather than later. Like, while we're actually fighting a war. And with all the foreign companies investing, we could actually have a real coalition. The coalition of the shilling. No German troops, but why not a Passat partnership?

(snip)

Maureen Dowd is a columnist for The New York Times.


Find this article at:
http://www.dailybreeze.com/opinion/articles/1151472.html