WASHINGTON – A shortage of “up-armored” Humvees in Iraq, highlighted Wednesday by a soldier’s pointed question to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is a consequence of insurgent tactics the military didn’t anticipate, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman said.

The Army ramped up production of such Humvees from 15 to 450 a month last year after insurgents started using “improvised explosive devices” – homemade bombs – against U.S. and allied troops, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita noted.

“This was, once again, a miscalculation by the Pentagon of exactly what kind of environment we would have after the fall of Saddam,” said Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a House Armed Services Committee member. The administration’s statements “sound like this is all a big surprise,” Tauscher said. “What you want to say to them is, “Hey, knock it off. It’s a big surprise because you thought you’d be out of there right now.”‘

The issue of armor shortages arose last year. Some parents of soldiers in Iraq reported having to buy flak vests for their sons and daughters because the Army was short of body armor and Humvees with the extra armor needed to withstand IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades.

Over the past year, the Bush administration and Congress have added $1.2 billion to the defense budget for body armor and armored vehicles and rapidly increased production of both. But shortages remain.

The issue flared again Wednesday when Rumsfeld spoke to the soldiers at a town hall meeting in Kuwait. He got this question from Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a Tennessee Army National Guard unit:

“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?”

Many in the audience of 2,300 soldiers cheered.

“We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north,” Wilson said after the defense secretary asked him to repeat the question.

Rumsfeld replied that the problem “isn’t a matter of money, it isn’t a matter on the part of the Army of desire. It’s a matter of production and capability of doing it.”

“As you know, you go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time. Since the Iraq conflict began, the Army has been pressing ahead to produce the armor necessary at a rate that they believe – it’s a greatly expanded rate from what existed previously – but at a rate that they believe is the rate that is all that can be accomplished at this moment.”

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., in a letter to the defense secretary, protested Rumsfeld’s response to the soldier.

” Secretary, our troops go to war with the Army that our nation’s leaders provide,” he wrote.

The deputy commander of U.S. forces in Kuwait, Maj. Gen. Gary Speer, told reporters accompanying Rumsfeld he was unaware of soldiers combing through landfills for scrap metal and bulletproof glass to put on their vehicles.

But Maj. Gen. Gus L. Hargett, adjutant general of the Tennessee National Guard, later issued an unusually blunt statement from Nashville saying he was “surprised by Gen. Speer’s statement.”

“I know that members of his staff were aware and assisted the 278th in obtaining these materials,” Hargett said. “Our own 230th Area Support Group from Dyersburg, now stationed in Kuwait, also assisted in this effort.”

Speer said that, to his knowledge, every vehicle going into Iraq from Kuwait has at least “Level 3” armor, meaning armor locally fabricated for the vehicles’ side panels but not bulletproof glass or armor against explosions under the floorboard.

Hargett said he had been assured of that and told that any vehicles of the 278th that lacked armor would be “trucked forward and will not be occupied by soldiers.”

But he also said that, “Spc. Wilson’s question is a legitimate concern,” and that, “Additional armor for vehicles in Iraq has been an issue since the beginning of the war for both active and reserve component soldiers.”

Tauscher and 12 other Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee wrote a letter Oct. 19 asking Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., to hold hearings on the shortage of armored vehicles after a group of reservists refused a convoy mission.

The 23 members of the 343rd Quartermaster Company declined Oct. 13 to drive a shipment of fuel along a dangerous route from an air base south of Baghdad to Taji, north of the capital city. The soldiers said the trucks they were to drive were in bad shape and lacked armor.

The Army announced this week that the reservists would face relatively mild forms of administrative punishment rather than courts-martial.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

Hunter has called no hearing on the armor issue yet, but members questioned Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, when he and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff appeared before the Armed Services Committee on Nov. 17.

Schoomaker told the panel that the Army had built “400,000-plus sets of body armor” in the previous fiscal year but “we need 373,000 sets more this coming year.”

As for up-armored Humvees, the most common form of transport for troops in Iraq, Schoomaker said the Army had been “chasing” a requirement – meaning requests from field commanders – that had risen steadily.

(EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE)

“We had 235 up-armored Humvees in-theater last year, and then we got a requirement for 1,407, so we started chasing that requirement,” Gen. Schoomaker testified. “A month later, we got a requirement for 3,000, and then it went to 4,150, and then it went to 6,223, and now it’s gone to 8,105.”

Humvee maker AM General of South Bend, Ind., makes 11 varieties of the vehicles, whose nickname comes from the acronym for High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV). Up-armored Humvees include the model M1114 and Humvees fitted with armor plating that comes in kits.

As of Wednesday, U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan had 5,910 up-armored Humvees and 9,134 Humvees with add-on armor, according to an Army fact sheet. Another 4,345 lack add-on armor.

Schoomaker estimated that the requirement for the additional up-armored Humvees would be met by April 2005. But he added that, “What we now have figured out is, look, what the heck, we better up-armor everything we’ve got over there. And that’s what we’re doing.”

—

(c) 2004, The Dallas Morning News.

Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com/

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

Copy the Story Link