Study: Delayed delivery of trucks led to Marine deaths - CNN.com

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

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Mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks can cost between $450,000 and $1 million.

The study was written by a civilian Marine Corps official and obtained by The Associated Press.

It accuses the service of "gross mismanagement" that delayed deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.

Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the MRAPs, according to the study.

Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which can cost as much as a $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded.

After Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared the MRAP the Pentagon's acquisition priority in May 2007, the trucks began to be shipped to Iraq in large quantities.

[From Study: Delayed delivery of trucks led to Marine deaths - CNN.com]

The MRAP is a family of military vehicles that is new to the US arsenal. These start as a heavy duty commercial chassis, then they build them into mine and IED resistant vehicles. The most important trait is that they all have a "V" shaped hull, which would deflect most of a blast from underneath and keep the vehicle roadworthy.



These trucks are not new, they have been making the PR rounds for a while. What is new is that it has created an interesting political nightmare for the Marines. Hindsight is of course 20-20 before Lasik, so what is going on right now is that somebody leaked a report that claims that of course, delaying the deployment of these trucks have cost X lives. That by itself is shocking, but what I find most interesting is the political infighting itself.



Way before I left the US Army, 11 years ago, we had a big push for using commercial, off-the-shelves gear (COTS) whenever it made sense. If we needed a computer and we had the budget, we could order it from Dell through their government sales instead of having to go through a 5-year program to study and analyze the specific needs for the computer and what kind of computer we needed. I know that sometime along these 11 years everyone else in the military embraced COTS.



The problem with COTS is that it screws with provisioning procedures that (read: bureaucracies) that have been in place for years. In other words, careers are at stake. There are people that do nothing but keep the old style provisioning process alive. These are civilians with nice cushy jobs, some of them got into these jobs after leaving the services. If you start speeding up the process to procure new things, then we don't need as many of these people around.



The article has a nice little section where it hints that one of the major reasons for the Marines to drag their feet with adopting the MRAP is because it would screw up with other long term projects that are years away from delivering whatever it is that they are trying to deliver. In other words: if we can get the right truck now, for a million bucks apiece, it means that we can't fund five years worth of studies and procurement on some other truck that costs $900,000 (now) and for which we will pay $1.2 million seven or eight years down the road. If we ever do it.



Remember, even if the program gets shelved without delivering a single truck, a lot of people got paid to sit on their asses all day and make powerpoint slides, take long lunches and screw around with their blackberries in the middle of their status meetings.



The good news is that somewhere along the line the right thing was done, and the trucks were approved for service. Maybe they can use this new vehicle family to learn what the hell is wrong with the HUMVEE and how to design a better replacement without having to resort to bolting on up-armoring kits at an additional expense to the tax payer, instead of making this a standard feature.