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02-20-2008, 10:56 AM
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#1 (permalink)
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Resident Mythbuster
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Bureaucracy blamed for Marine Casualties
Study: Delay of armored vehicle fatal -- chicagotribune.com
Quote:
Study: Delay of armored vehicle fatal
Bureaucracy blamed for Marine casualties
By Richard Lardner, Associated Press Associated Press researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report from New York
8:56 AM CST, February 17, 2008
WASHINGTON - Hundreds of 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.
The study, written by a civilian Marine Corps official. 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 reject the request for the so-called MRAPs, the study concluded. Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which can cost as much as $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years away.
After Defense Secretary Robert Gates declared the MRAP the Pentagon's No. 1 acquisition priority in May 2007, the trucks began to be shipped to Iraq in large quantities.
The vehicles weigh as much as 40 tons and have been effective at protecting U.S. troops from improvised explosive devices, the weapon of choice for Iraqi insurgents. Only four GIs have been killed by such bombs while riding in MRAPs; three of those deaths occurred in older versions of the vehicles.
The study's author, Franz Gayl, catalogs what he says were flawed decisions and missteps by midlevel managers in Marine Corps offices that occurred well before Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld in December 2006.
Among the findings in the Jan. 22 study:
* Budget and procurement managers failed to recognize the damage being done by IEDs in late 2004 and early 2005 and were convinced that the best solution was adding more armor to the less-sturdy Humvees the Marines were using. Humvees, even those with extra layers of steel, proved incapable of blunting the increasingly powerful explosives planted by insurgents.
* 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 Marine Corps' acquisition staff did not give top leaders correct information. Gen. James Conway, the Marines Corps commandant, was not told of the gravity of Hejlik's MRAP request and the real reasons it was shelved, Gayl writes. That led to Conway giving "inaccurate and incomplete" information to Congress about why buying MRAPs was not hotly pursued.
* 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 of a rapid-reaction force.
* The Combat Development Command has managers who have outdated views of what works on the battlefield and how the defense industry operates, Gayl says. Yet they are in position to ignore or overrule calls from deployed commanders.
Inquiry recommended
An inquiry should be conducted by the Marine Corps inspector general to determine whether any military or government employees are culpable for failing to rush critical gear to the troops, recommends Gayl, who prepared the study for the Marine Corps' plans, policies and operations department.
The AP obtained the study from a non-government source.
"If the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005 in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time, as the [Marine Corps] is doing today, hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented," writes Gayl, the science and technology adviser to Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, who heads the plans department.
Gayl, who has clashed with superiors in the past and filed for whistle-blower protection last year, uses official documents, e-mails, briefing charts, memos, congressional testimony and news articles to make his case.
He was not allowed to interview or correspond with any employees connected to the Combat Development Command. The study's cover page says the views in the study are his own.
Maj. Manuel Delarosa, a Marine Corps spokesman, called Gayl's study "predecisional staff work" and said it would be inappropriate to comment on it. "It would be inaccurate to state that Lt. Gen. Natonski has seen or is even aware of" the study, Delarosa said.
Last year, the service defended the decision to not buy MRAPs after receiving the 2005 request. There were too few companies able to make the vehicles, and armored Humvees were adequate, officials said then.
Hejlik, who is now a major general and heads the Marine Corps Special Operations Command, has cast his 2005 statement as more of a recommendation than a demand for a specific system. The term mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicle "was very generic" and intended to guide a broader discussion of what type of truck would be needed to defend against the changing threats troops in the field faced, Hejlik told reporters in May 2007.
Casualty estimate's basis
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.
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 preceding nine months by IEDs while traveling in vehicles.
The MRAP, Conway told Pace, could reduce IED casualties in vehicles by 80 percent. Delivering MRAPs to Marines in Iraq, Conway wrote, was his "number one unfilled warfighting requirement at this time." Overall, he added, the Marine Corps needed 3,700 MRAPs -- more than three times the number Hejlik requested in 2005.
More than 3,200 U.S. troops, including 824 Marines, have been killed in action in Iraq since the war began in March 2003. An additional 29,000 have been wounded, nearly 8,400 of them Marines. The majority of the deaths and injuries have been caused by explosive devices, according to the Defense Department.
In late November, the Marine Corps announced it would buy 2,300 MRAPs -- 1,400 fewer than planned. Improved security in Iraq, changes in tactics and decreasing troop levels allowed for the cut.
A former Marine officer, Gayl spent nearly six months in Iraq in 2006 and 2007 as an adviser to leaders of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force.
He filed for whistle-blower protection last May, saying he was threatened with disciplinary action after meeting with congressional staff.
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02-27-2008, 13:13 PM
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#2 (permalink)
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Resident Mythbuster
Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-07-06
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Quote:
Senators call for probe on MRAP report's claims
By Peter Eisler and Tom Vanden Brook, USA TODAY
February 17, 2008
WASHINGTON — Two senators Sunday urged the Pentagon to investigate a Marine Corps report that says procurement officers spurned requests from commanders in Iraq for blast-resistant vehicles because they didn't want to derail other projects.
Sens. Joseph Biden, D-Del., and Kit Bond, R-Mo., called for an official probe. The report says that hundreds of Marines died from roadside bombs because the Corps was slow to fill commanders' requests for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs.
"This is a stark warning that the military brass back home is not acting on needs of our war fighters," Biden said in a written statement. "We need an official investigation to figure out why this happened and to make sure it never happens again."
The report by Marine science adviser Franz Gayl asserts that procurement officers needlessly delayed responding to a February 2005 request for 1,169 MRAPs to protect troops from improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, that were destroying their Humvees. Those officials were wed to a long-term plan to replace the Marines' Humvees with a new truck — the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle — that isn't slated for deployment until at least 2012, the report says.
The Marine decision-makers saw the JLTV "as a higher priority than the daily killed and wounded," the report says. The February 2005 urgent request was finally approved in May 2006.
USA TODAY on Friday obtained a copy of Gayl's report, which the Associated Press had received earlier, and reported on it online over the weekend.
"This gross mismanagement … is inexcusable," Bond said in a statement. "The military needs to take a hard look at (Gayl's) report detailing the bureaucratic delays of life-saving equipment to our troops."
Gayl's paper represents his opinion and has not been reviewed by anyone above his immediate supervisor, a Marine colonel, said Marine spokesman Col. Dave Lapan. The paper, Lapan said, is Gayl's viewpoint, which has not been reviewed by anyone else in the Marine Corps.
The paper will be reviewed to determine if any of his conclusions are substantiated by facts, especially his implication that senior Marines with decades of service made decisions with anything but the health, welfare and safety of Marines at heart, Lapan said.
Last year, USA TODAY reported in a series of stories that Pentagon officials failed repeatedly to act on MRAP requests from field commanders. Since May, Defense officials have committed at least $22 billion to buy about 15,000 of the vehicles.
Gayl's report says that even after Defense Secretary Robert Gates made MRAPs the Pentagon's No. 1 priority, Marine officials balked at adding more protection to safeguard the vehicles against new, more potent roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, that can go through armor.
The Marines "did not seriously begin to invest in an … EFP solution until after USA TODAY's publication (of stories) of MRAP's vulnerability," the report says.
The report also says that Marine Gen. James Conway, the Corps commandant, provided Congress with "incomplete and inaccurate" information last year when he said field commanders had not expressed a strong desire for MRAPs. He was relying on erroneous input from the procurement officers who had delayed acting on the requests, the report says.
Gayl, a persistent critic of the Pentagon's MRAP efforts, filed last year for whistle-blower protection.
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Last edited by Shipwreck : 02-28-2008 at 05:53 AM.
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02-28-2008, 05:51 AM
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#3 (permalink)
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Resident Mythbuster
Senior Contributor
Join Date: 01-07-06
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Quote:
U.S. Marines Halt MRAP Report
By TOM VANDEN BROOK, USA TODAY
Published: 26 Feb 21:53 EST (16:53 GMT)
WASHINGTON - The U. S. Marine Corps has ordered a civilian scientist to stop work on a report critical of its efforts to obtain new armored vehicles, saying he exceeded his authority, a Marine official said Feb. 26.
Franz Gayl, a retired Marine officer and civilian science adviser, alleged in a Jan. 22 report that "gross mismanagement" of the program to quickly field Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles had resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of Marines in Iraq. Gayl had planned to continue his investigation.
"He's been told to stop any further work," said Col. David Lapan, a Marine spokesman. "It's gotten beyond its initial purpose." Lapan said Gayl exceeded his authority by writing about MRAPs because the proposal that requested the report never specifically mentioned the new armored vehicles by name.
Wednesday, top Marine generals will appear before a House Armed Services subcommittee to testify about the Corps' budget request and the status of the Marines' MRAP program. Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat and subcommittee chairman, said he would ask about the Gayl report.
Gayl's report was first made public by The Associated Press on Feb. 15. The report said Marine procurement officers spurned requests from commanders in Iraq for blast-resistant vehicles because they didn't want to derail other projects.
On Feb. 20, the Marines asked the Pentagon inspector general to investigate the claims, two days after USA Today reported that two U.S. senators had demanded an investigation.
Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, who approved Gayl's investigation, never saw the report because Gayl's superiors hadn't verified the conclusions, Lapan said. The charges of gross mismanagement were so serious that top Marine officers asked the Pentagon's inspector general to investigate, he said. The Marines haven't determined whether Gayl's conclusions are valid, said Lapan, who called the report internal and preliminary.
Gayl's initial proposal indicated he would look at MRAPs and other equipment and weapons systems, said Adam Miles of the Government Accountability Project, a non-partisan Washington watchdog group.
Miles' organization provides legal counsel to Gayl, who filed for federal whistle-blower protection in May. Miles said Gayl had planned further studies on how the Marines had failed to field other needed equipment, including one regarding nonlethal weapons.
Miles applauded the call for an inspector general's investigation. "After the Marine Corps had basically spent a week trying to distance itself from Franz's study, this was important acknowledgement of the serious issues that he's raised," he said.
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