Posted on 05/05/2004 9:26:30 PM PDT by Vetvoice
While the dramas in Fallujah and Najaf come to a conclusion, the Army's soldiers are still riding the roads of Iraq in inferior armored vehicles while the better-protected armored personnel carriers are waiting for them in Kuwait.
We're asking our troops to perform a job with the wrong tools, a mistake rooted in the 1999 decision by President Clinton's Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki to take the Army off tracks and put it on wheels.
When, in July 2003, acting Army Chief of Staff Gen. John Keane laid out the overall Army plan to rotate the units stationed in Iraq since the start of the war and replace them with fresh units from the United States and Europe, his plan included a surprise development: The new Fort Lewis Stryker Brigade would be part of the replacement strategy.
Under Keane's rotation plan, the Stryker Brigade would deploy to Iraq, overlapping with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment for five or six months, after which the cavalry unit would return to the United States. Despite delays, the absence of its main offensive weapon and the fact that it had yet to be certified as a combat unit, the Stryker Brigade (3rd Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division) deployed on a combat mission to Iraq last December.
Considered by the Army generals to be too "thin-skinned" to take part in combat, the Stryker Brigade is stationed in the generally tame extreme north of Iraq in Mosul in territory controlled by the Kurds. Reports are that some Strykers have been moved south to provide convoy protection but their protection for, or of, anything is questionable. They lack firepower.
When the rotation plan began, the Army was in full panic mode, trying to add armor to the light trucks (Humvees) that it purchased in the '80s. Our soldiers have been patrolling, convoying and dying in these unprotected vehicles. The Army's knee-jerk reaction of "up-armoring" the Humvees with added steel on the sides and thick window coverings is offset by the laws of physics. To now add 2,500 to 3,000 pounds of armor, Plexiglas, sandbags on the floor to guard against mines and still try to carry the 2,000 pounds of cargo for which the truck was originally built has, predictably, placed many of them in garages and junk yards years before their scheduled retirement date.
But we already had -- and still have -- 700 upgraded M113A2-3 armored personnel carriers stored as "prepositioned stock" in Kuwait, scarcely 20 miles south of the Iraqi border. Using these 700 truly armored M113s and stripping our National Guard units for many of the 11,000 M113s we have stateside could have eliminated most of the deaths inflicted in the past 13 months by Improvised Explosive Devices.
The M113 could be hit by an Improvised Explosive Device but should have the same advantages as the Humvees of superior armor and heavier weight to help it hold the road and not crash. So, the enemy is fixed in Fallujah and Najaf. What are the commanders supposed to use to spearhead an attack against his fortifications? It certainly cannot be the wheeled vehicles that are Shinseki's legacy.
The unnecessary deaths of our soldiers due to a lack of armored convoy and patrol vehicles are a command blunder that should result in some general officers, at the very least, being sacked and possibly tried for manslaughter -- because they have apparently kept secret safer vehicles available to the troops in Iraq from the command authority of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers.
Exactly what never thrilled me about being a possible Bradley Commander and what currently does not thrill me about being a Stryker Commander.
Thanks for the first-hand insights. The closest I've come to being in combat with Bradleys was at Ft. Pickett being chased by OPFOR M-1s. It surprises me that they're so survivable against RPGs. What version of M2 were you on?
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