No good answers

Friday, Feb. 22, 2008 | 2:08 a.m.

Members of Congress have called for an investigation into a military report that says Marine Corps officials refused urgent battlefield requests for bomb-resistant vehicles in 2005 because they were saving the money for development of lighter vehicles.

The report, written by a civilian Marine Corps official and brought to light two weeks ago by the Associated Press, estimates that hundreds of U.S. troops may have been killed or wounded by roadside bombs because of refusals to equip them with mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles, or MRAPs.

Military budget and procurement managers in late 2004 and early 2005 failed to understand the extent of damage that could be inflicted by the explosives favored by Iraqi insurgents, the report says.

Rather than sending the explosive-resistant vehicles, these officials recommended that Humvees be equipped with additional armor. It didn’t work, and more troops died or were wounded.

What’s more, the report says, an urgent request in February 2005 for 1,169 explosive-resistant vehicles vanished in a tangle of bureaucracy. That request, signed by Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, commander in western Iraq at the time, said the vehicles were necessary because the Marines could not continue to suffer “serious and grave casualties” from insurgents’ explosives when equipment to protect them was readily available.

But a single MRAP costs about $1 million, and military procurement officials didn’t want to endanger funding that had been marked for development of a lighter blast-resistant vehicle equipment that remains years away from being employed.

Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said last week that the report serves as a “stark warning that the military brass back home is not acting on the needs of our war fighters.” Biden and Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., have called for an investigation to “make sure it never happens again.”

Tragically, whatever solution is found will come too late for hundreds of soldiers and their families. When a brigadier general on the front line of a war makes an urgent request for equipment to protect his troops, the equipment should be sent. Period.