No Man Left Behind?

I had a wonderful conversation with my father Saturday morning during which he mentioned an article about the Marine Corps command structure deliberately delaying the mass deployment of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected trucks (MRAPs). The reasons, as seen below, are estimated to have resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. For the sake of protecting other vehicle weapons platform programs they deemed more important and due to their general ineptitude, someone's son or daughter isn't coming home alive or is coming home gravely wounded and permanently disabled.

I don't really have anything to say about this as the article speaks for itself. The next time Bush and his asinine cronies want to point fingers at the Dems and say their delays in budget approvals for the war are costing lives, please spread this to those who would listen to that sort of jackassery.

Pull quotes from the article, just to get you started...

• The Combat Development Command, which decides what gear to buy, treated the MRAP as an expensive obstacle to long-range plans for equipment that was more mobile and fit into the Marines Corps' vision as a rapid reaction force. Those projects included a Humvee replacement called the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle and a new vehicle for reconnaissance and surveillance missions.

• An urgent February 2005 request for MRAPs got lost in bureaucracy. It was signed by then-Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, who asked for 1,169 of the vehicles. The Marines could not continue to take "serious and grave casualties" caused by IEDs when a solution was commercially available, wrote Hejlik, who was a commander in western Iraq from June 2004 to February 2005. Gayl cites documents showing Hejlik's request was shuttled to a civilian logistics official at the Marine Corps Combat Development Command in suburban Washington who had little experience with military vehicles. As a result, there was more concern over how the MRAP would upset the Marine Corps' supply and maintenance chains than there was in getting the troops a truck that would keep them alive, the study contends.

• The study does not say precisely how many Marine casualties Gayl thinks occurred due to the lack of MRAPs, which have V-shaped hulls that deflect blasts out and away from the vehicles. Gayl cites a March 1, 2007, memo from Conway to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in which Conway said 150 service members were killed and an additional 1,500 were seriously injured in the prior nine months by IEDs while traveling in vehicles.

Sigh...

CNN Article Here

Armytimes Article