What, pray tell could cause me to put that expletive partially deleted as my title? This story from the New York Times (via Raw Story)about how well Bush’s Pentagon has supported the troops, that’s what:
By MICHAEL MOSS
Published: January 6, 2006A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.
Think that’s bad? That’s only just for starters. Read this:
The vulnerability of the military’s body armor has been known since the start of the war, and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until this September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine Corps officials acknowledge.
The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase, according to Army procurement officials. They said the Army is deciding between various sizes of plates to give its 130,000 soldiers; the officials said they hope to issue contracts this month.
What the hell is this? Almost 3 years into this mess and the Army still hasn’t placed an order for better personal body armor? Body armor that could have saved many more lives? What happened to Support Our Troops? Or is that only a slogan on a ribbon magnet, suitable for display on an SUV, but not really a top priority of Bush’s War on Terror.
This just sickens me. Haven’t we already been through this before?
Thursday, December 9, 2004 Posted: 4:37 AM EST (0937 GMT)
. . . One soldier, identified by The Associated Press as Army Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a Tennessee National Guard outfit, asked Rumsfeld why more military combat vehicles were not reinforced for battle conditions.
“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” Wilson asked.
The question prompted cheers from some of the approximately 2,300 troops assembled in the large hangar to hear Rumsfeld deliver a pep talk at what the Pentagon called a town hall meeting.
Can’t these bastards do anything right?
Sorry but I can’t be rational about this. I just have too much outrage.
Update [2006-1-6 20:32:12 by Steven D]: SusanG agrees with me.
Yeah. Sicko values in our country. It’s bad enough to invade a defenseless country and slaughter tens of thousands of innocent civilians, but we can slake our guilt at least on the fact that we slaughtered some of our own people, too.
What I wonder is, why haven’t the armed forces put more pressure on Washington to get the killer-clowns out of government?
It’s time to move forward with replacement of this administration (peacefully and legally, of course). Isn’t it?
80% of Marine casualties could have been prevented had they the proper armor. They were scrambling for scrap metal.
And wasn’t Rumsfeld’s answer, “Well, you fight with the army you’ve got.”
What I find unbelievable is that the NYT decided to report it. I also have to wonder about the diversion of funds….
This should finish it. Really.
Unfortunately, the Army we’ve got is stuck with the Secretary of Defense they’ve got, (not to mention the Commander-in Chief)
Spot on. And after paying the Rendon Group and the Lincoln Group for what was considered paramount – positive media spin, they came up short on funds for protective gear.
My, my. Photo-ops, Imagery are priorities 1 and 2. That’s why all is well.
Maybe you should point out that 100% of the casualties could have been avoided if Bush had not knowlingly stated untruths to the American people and Congress.
Touche’
Steven…you ask:
“Can’t these bastards do anything right?“
And the answer is:
No.
This corporate culture that is running the government, big business AND the media/propaganda system here in the United States can by and large no longer do anything “right”.
They cannot build a decent automobile for the working and middle classes. And when they DO….they can’t market it.
They cannot cure the simplest illnesses. The common cold, indigestion. So they market palliatives instead.
They cannot produce much in the way of meaningful culture.
They cannot run an educational system that really educates.
Their food supply is tainted by massive chemical pollution.
And, as Mao Tse Tung observed as early as the mid-1950s, their military is in reality a paper tiger as well.
Capable of massive destruction and nothing else.
USELESS in a situation where they want to preserve something of value…oil in this case…and a population to be used as labor to produce it and then ship it to the victors.
Plus…they consider the soldiers to be an expendable asset. As long as the bosses get their oil and remain able play their covert power games with creatures like Chalabi, they are quite happy. What’s another plebe or two? They’d just be hanging out and the corner and causing trouble anyway if they weren’t fighting the good fight…
I will GUARANTEE that some flaccid son of a bitch in an expensive suit somewhere in Washington has said something at a high level meeting to the effect of “What are they all complaining about? We’ve only lost a couple of thousand men!!! Hell, we lost sixty thousand in Vietnam and if theyd’a just shut the fuck up about it, we woulda won THAT one, too.”
Hell, Steven…this corporate culture stonewalled the tobacco/cancer connection for 30 years at the cost of MILLIONS of lives. If we hadn’t pitched a bitch, these motherfuickers would still be building Pintos and roasting us alive every time there was a rear end collision.
Taken any Vioxx lately?
Learned anything from the Thalidomide scandal, did they?
Ya think?
Not a fucking chance.
New Orleans?
Just a buncha welfare niggers.
No rush…
Body armor?
For PRIVATES!!!???
Whaddayou…kiddin’ me?
That’s EXPENSIVE!!!
We got THINGS to do!!!
SUITS to buy!!!
MONEY to steal!!!
Joseph Conrad wrote “”The horror! The horror!” as Kurtz’s last words in “Heart Of Darkness”.
Had he been writing about THIS heart of darkness…this cabal of thieves and hustlers currently in power here…it would have been “The shame! The shame!”
We are living under the tyranny of the weak.
Karl Rove is the perfect poster boy for what is happening here.
The weak sissy boy of everyone’s high school, come home to rule the roost out of envy and spite.
The shame! The shame!
And the SHAM!!!
The tyranny of the weak.
Nasty.
The shame is OUR shame.
WE let this happen.
And now the question is…what are we going to DO about it.
I can hear them now, fat and sleek in their K Street eateries.
“Yeah…that’s right!! Whaddaya gonna DO about it?”
Well…?
What ARE we going to do about it?
AG
Booman,
Just read one of your other posts where you wondered why Google had closed your Adsense account, so it looks like they’ve already taken action against you. Just in case you were wondering you got banned for running a linkfarm:
sale.boomantribune.com
Just like this one here, which coincidentally looks exactly like yours (using the same template?)
coupons.hadeseh.com
So now that Google has killed your Google Adsense account, maybe you should go ahead and pull the plug on the site, since you’re not making any more money off it. 😎
Related… from Empire Burlesque
Please believe me when I say I hold no brief for these guys, and I do agree the budget folks did not pay enough attention to providing armor (for bodies and vehicles) before and in the early stages of this war.
But there are a lot of complicated trade-offs in providing this stuff. I had some personal experience in basically quiet, but sometime combat zones where we (OSCE observers) were not really targets, but could easily have been caught in crossfire or targeted by mistake. (South Ossetia & Abkhazia.) Vienna sent us some $3,000/copy “bullet-proof” vests, which our military mission members took out and shot up — they wouldn’t even stop a Tokarev round at close range. So later we bought some Ukrainian vests with strong ceramic plates that weighed around 18 kilos, but cost only around $300.00. They would stop even an AK 7.2 mm round at close range, but were just too heavy to wear around.
More than ten years on, and with our technology advancing somewhat, I’m sure the alternatives are better — but they’re not easy, and I don’t think you can get really good info till this stuff is tested in actual battle.
I would guess, by the way, that the Soviet technical development that went into those Ukrainian vests is the same basic plan our forces use now. You have ceramic plates that will stop most projectiles, but are completely inflexible and necessarily leave gaps when you stick them into a vest. I suppose you could cover the gaps with further plates, but then you run into more weight . . . well, leave it to the engineers, but don’t blame the policymakers for not getting the armor right — blame them for sending forces into a situation where “We really didn’t see the insurgency coming,” as former proconsul Bremer is quoted in the Washington Post today.