Word: armorers
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Army General Barry McCaffrey, "but not to a soldier who's extremely concerned about the safety of himself and his buddies." Rumsfeld compounded the gaffe by adding that "you can have all the armor in the world in a tank, and a tank can be blown up." On Capitol Hill, Democrats ripped Rumsfeld for his insensitivity. "By that logic," says Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, "we should send our troops into battle on bicycles...
...equipment shortages--troops' hammering sheet metal onto humvees or asking their families to send bulletproof vests--as isolated kinks in the military supply chain. But last week, in response to Specialist Wilson, military officials were forced to acknowledge an unsettling reality: the U.S. has nowhere near the number of armored humvees in Iraq required to adequately protect troops from the insurgents' weapon of choice, the improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb. Of the 19,389 humvees in Iraq, 5,910 are fully armored, while an additional 9,134 are outfitted with less effective, bolted-on armor. But that leaves...
...shortage of armored humvees is a parable for the miscalculations that have plagued the U.S. enterprise in Iraq. Given that it was a war of choice for the U.S., the typical soldier's reasoning goes, the Pentagon had plenty of time and money to make sure the troops had everything they needed. But John Keane, the Army's No. 2 officer during the war, told TIME last week that "we did not anticipate fighting an insurgency in Iraq, and that's the truth of it." As the rebellion escalated in late summer 2003, the Army didn't have the armor...
...insurgency intensified, soldiers in Iraq began replacing the humvees' canvas doors with metal plates, draping Kevlar fabric over the seats and lining the floors with sandbags. Slowly but surely, the Pentagon began outfitting soft-skinned humvees with 1,000-lb. Armor Survivability Kits--which protect passengers from ground-level attacks but don't harden the humvee's floor, a major vulnerability when dealing with roadside bombs. The Pentagon has also scoured the globe for heavily armored humvees, sending to Iraq hundreds that had been based in the Balkans, Germany and South Korea. Even a few earmarked to protect the Pentagon...
...soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up-armor our vehicles?" SPECIALIST THOMAS WILSON, of the Tennessee National Guard, to U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in a town-hall meeting with soldiers at Camp Buehring in Kuwait; later a reporter revealed that he had prompted Wilson to ask the question...