One Utah

While the last Congress made sure that this year’s military budget included $20 million for a victory parade, they might better have used that money– and a lot more –to address the Army’s staggering equipment shortages. Logistics may seem like a boring subject compared to the death and destruction going on in Iraq. Well, it is boring until you realize the Bush administration wants to boost troop numbers by 48,000 (five combat brigades plus support units), but nobody knows where to get enough vehicles and weapons for them.

From the Washington Post:

The depletion of major equipment such as tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and especially helicopters and armored Humvees has left many military units in the United States without adequate training gear, officials say. Partly as a result of the shortages, many U.S. units are rated “unready” to deploy.

…Lt. Col. Mike Johnson, a senior Army planner, said: “Before, if a unit was less than C-1,” or fully ready, “someone would get fired.” Now, he said, that is accepted as combat-zone rotations are sapping all units of gear and manpower. “It’s a cost of continuous operations. You can’t be ready all the time,” he said.

From the Center for American Progress

[T]he Department of Defense (DoD) must continuously repair, rebuild and replace equipment worn out or destroyed by the war effort, a process known as “reset.” However, normal sustainment patterns have been threatened by the war in Iraq due to the high utilization rates and harsh conditions of the Iraqi environment. The Abrams tank, for example, is operating at six times its rate during peacetime, while medium and heavy trucks are operating at 10 times the typical peacetime rate.

…Congress should fully fund the service’s $9 billion request for reset funding in fiscal 2006, and a similar level of reset funding should be sustained in subsequent years as long as the Army maintains a major presence in Iraq.

From USA Today

About $2 billion worth of Army and Marine Corps equipment — from rifles to tanks — is wearing out or being destroyed every month in Iraq and Afghanistan, military leaders and outside experts say.

…The Pentagon needs $50 billion to $60 billion to re-equip and restore units returning from Iraq, says Leon Panetta, the former Clinton White House chief of staff and member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

According to Talking Points Memo, the Pentagon’s Inspector General (IG) recently completed a classified report on equipment shortages. Interference with the IG survey seems to indicate the Bush administration attempted to hide the extent of equipment problems from Congress.

For the Bush administration to escalate the fighting in Iraq without equipping our soldiers with enough armored vehicles, weapons, body armor, communications gear, ammunition, spare parts and everything else they need to move, shoot and communicate would be yet another catastrophic blunder. Or what VP Dick Cheney might call an “enormous success”?

Yesterday, Senator Russ Feingold decided to ditch the non-binding resolutions and initiated legislation to get our Army back from Iraq before it’s too late. His Iraq Redeployment Act of 2007 would force President Bush to safely redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq by prohibiting funds for continued operations six months after enactment.

Support for Feingold, from kos: “A successful non-binding resolution will be no more useful in ending this disastrous war than a failed binding one. So let’s make a real statement on the war, not empty platitudes and rhetoric.”

UPDATE: A report in Asia Times says the Army needs $17.1 billion in fiscal 2007 to “reset.” The Marines need $12.8 billion to re-equip units with vehicles and gear lost in combat and through wear and tear. “The truth is that after nearly four years of fighting in Iraq, the US military is deeply stressed and worn out by its operations there. While most dispassionate observers are aware of this, it is not something the Bush administration likes to talk about.”

Since the Iraq insurgency heated up in autumn of 2003, the US Army’s combat losses include at least 20 M1 Abrams tanks, 50 Bradley fighting vehicles, 20 Stryker wheeled combat vehicles, 20 M113 armored personnel carriers, and 250 Humvees. The number of vehicles lost in battle comes to nearly 1,000 after adding in heavy and medium trucks and trailers, mine-clearing vehicles, and Fox wheeled reconnaissance vehicles. Nearly all these losses were caused by improvised explosive devices in Iraq.

This entry was posted Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Disaster, Federal Budget, Iraq, This Blog, War. Both comments and pings are currently closed.