SHOW: Day to Day 4:00 AM EST NPR December 09, 2004
US soldier challenges Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the lack of armored vehicles in Iraq
ANCHORS: ALEX CHADWICK
REPORTERS: MIKE PESCA
ALEX CHADWICK, host:
From NPR News and Slate magazine online, this is DAY TO DAY. I'm Alex Chadwick.
Coming up, DAY TO DAY interviews soldiers in Iraq about problems with armor and equipment, and that is our lead story. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today is promising more will be done to protect forces after tough questions yesterday in a meeting with troops in Kuwait.
Specialist THOMAS WILSON (278th Regimental Combat Team): Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles, and why don't we have those resources readily available to us?
(Soundbite of crowd cheering)
CHADWICK: That was Army Specialist Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team. Secretary Rumsfeld answered that the military is in the process of armoring vehicles but that that takes time. In truth, the military has made progress in armoring its Humvees, but there are still vulnerabilities. DAY TO DAY's Mike Pesca reports.
MIKE PESCA reporting:
When the war in Iraq began over 18 months ago, most of the Humvees that the troops rode in were unarmored. Stories of individuals and units crafting their own protection began to filter back to the United States. Andy Gembara, a former Special Operations commando, has a daughter who was a captain attached to a unit which operated in the Sunni triangle. Gembara says his daughter and her fellow soldiers were forced to improvise.
Mr. ANDY GEMBARA (Father of Army Captain): They went to a local shop in the town that was outside of their base and had metal plates welded onto--underneath the floor so if there's a mine--also onto the sides to protect them from small arms.
PESCA: Yesterday the spokesman for the Pentagon, Lawrence DiRita, portrayed the military's reaction to the shortage of armored vehicles as swift and inspiring.
Mr. LAWRENCE DiRITA (Pentagon Spokesman): It's one of the great sort of stories of what happens in the United States when the country is at war. When the country is at war, the war begins and then we start to mobilize. And this is a perfect example of the kind of mobilization that took place. We're now producing something on the order of 450 armored Humvees a month, so it's multiples of what we were producing just a year ago--a little bit more than a year ago.
PESCA: To get their vehicles armored, the military is wasting no effort.
Mr. JOHN PIKE (GlobalSecurity.org President): They're operating a chop shop on Humvees and other vehicles there in Kuwait.
PESCA: That's military expert John Pike, who is president of GlobalSecurity.org. Pike says the military's effort to churn out armored Humvees or add armor to existing Humvees--`up-armoring,' it's called--is advancing speedily enough. He says that 90 percent of their quota has been met. The trap is in thinking that the Humvees are the only vehicles we're talking about or in fact the vehicles that Army Specialist Thomas Wilson was asking Secretary Rumsfeld about. In this war where roadside bombs have become the favorite weapon of insurgents, it's lumbering transport trucks that have been asked to drive through dangerous areas which remain the most vulnerable targets, according to John Pike.
Mr. PIKE: They're having a hard time figuring out how they're going to armor these vehicles because you can't simply hang armor on these trucks. You also have to give them a new suspension; you have to give them a new transmission. You're basically almost having to completely rebuild some of these trucks in order to give them adequate ballistic protection, and that's going to take some time to do.
PESCA: This is where the explanation offered by Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita falls short. He informed reporters that the only time unarmored Humvees were used was when they were transported to a base and they weren't used off base in Iraq. But the general standing next to him during the briefing admitted that the very trucks doing the transporting were unarmored. In his answer to Specialist Wilson, Donald Rumsfeld offered a broader explanation.
Secretary DONALD RUMSFELD (Defense Department): You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.
PESCA: US Congresswoman Ellen Tauscher, a member of the Armed Services Committee, says that the reason why unarmored vehicles are even such an issue is that the war we're fighting now is so different from the war we went into.
Representative ELLEN TAUSCHER (Democrat, California): That was a military-to-military engagement between Iraqi Republican Guard and Saddam soldiers and American and coalition forces. Subsequently, what we now have is a very different guerrilla type war that is very difficult for us to fight because it isn't the type of offensive-defensive engagement that you see in a typical battle. When the battlefield changed and our mission changed, we did not move fast enough to understand what that meant.
PESCA: John Pike, drawing on over two decades of experience as a military analyst, says the challenge of armoring vehicles is far from a logistics calamity; it will just take time. He predicts that eventually the military we have will be the military we wished we had. Until the need to transform again presents itself. For DAY TO DAY, I'm Mike Pesca.
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