(more news from the future, Freedom is on the march!?!)
By Michael Moss The New York Times
MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2005
When U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld visited Iraq last year to tour the Abu Ghraib prison camp, U.S. military officials did not rely on a government-issued Humvee to transport him safely on the ground. Instead,
they turned to Halliburton, the oil services contractor, which lent the Pentagon a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner. U.S. State Department officials traveling in Iraq use armored vehicles that are built with V-shaped hulls to better deflect bullets and bombs. Members of the U.S. Congress favor another model, called the M1117, which can endure 12-pound, or five-kilogram, explosives and .50-caliber, or 12.7-millimeter, armor-piercing rounds.
Unlike the Humvee, the Pentagon's vehicle of choice for U.S. troops, the others were designed specifically to withstand bigger attacks in battlefields like Iraq with no safe zones. Last fall, for instance, a Rhino traveling the treacherous airport road in Baghdad endured a bomb that left a crater six feet, or two meters, wide. The passengers walked away unscathed. "I have no doubt should I have been in any other vehicle," wrote a U.S. Army captain, the lone military passenger, "the results would have been catastrophically different."
Yet more than two years into the war, efforts by U.S. military units to obtain large numbers of these stronger vehicles for soldiers have faltered, even as the Pentagon's program to armor Humvees continues to be plagued by delays, an examination by The New York Times has found. Many of the problems stem from a 40-year-old procurement system that cannot acquire new equipment quickly enough to adapt to the changing demands of a modern insurgency, interviews and records show.
<
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/06/26/news/armor.php>
(more at link above)
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
