Once again the Pentagon doesn't put the money where it should

Now I'm especially glad I posted my earlier article about the Air Force preparing for space war. That just goes to show how far from reality the Joint Chiefs are. Instead of buying the absolute best equipment for soldiers on the ground, we're developing the "Future Warrior" to fight in the wars of tomorrow. Well, that's good and we need to do it, but not at the expense of body armor for the troops. Of course I could be charitable and say that planners simply never realized larger ceramic plates in the armor would be a good thing. Being uncharitable, I would say that is unforgiveably stupid. To wit:

A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor.

Now don't go making the assumption that that means all of that 80% would have survived, because they almost certainly wouldn't. However, expanded armor would have given them a much better chance to survive.

The ceramic plates in vests now worn by the majority of troops in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds that were analyzed in the Pentagon study of marines from March 2003 through June 2005, bullets and shrapnel struck the marines' shoulders, sides or areas of the torso where the plates do not reach.

Thirty-one of the deadly wounds struck the chest or back so close to the plates that simply enlarging the existing shields "would have had the potential to alter the fatal outcome," according to the study, which was obtained by The New York Times.

The military knew of this vulnerability, yet chose to do nothing about it.

The vulnerability of the military's body armor has been known since the start of the war, and is part of a series of problems that have surrounded the protection of American troops. Still, the Marine Corps did not begin buying additional plates to cover the sides of their troops until last September, when it ordered 28,800 sets, Marine officials acknowledge.

The Army, which has the largest force in Iraq, is still deciding what to purchase, according to Army procurement officials. They said the Army was deciding among various sizes of plates to give its 130,000 soldiers, adding that they hoped to issue contracts this month.

The question is why wasn't this done before the start of the war? Well, because they hadn't had an official study, or something like that.

The Pentagon has been collecting the data on wounds since the beginning of the war in March 2003 in part to determine the effectiveness of body armor. The military's medical examiner, Dr. Craig T. Mallak, told a military panel in 2003 that the information "screams to be published." But it would take nearly two years.

The Marine Corps said it asked for the data in August 2004; but it needed to pay the medical examiner $107,000 to have the data analyzed. Marine officials said financing and other delays had resulted in the study's not starting until December 2004. It finally began receiving the information by June 2005.

And then the question is: why hadn't a study been done? The Army does plenty of tests on all sorts of things, so why couldn't they shoot one of those ballistic gelatin bodies wearing this armor to see how effectively it protected soldiers against lethal wounds? Keeping in mind that I don't know any of the Joint Chiefs personally, I would bet you it's because we still weren't planning to be involved in any situation like this, where our soldiers were fighting in cities and being shot at from all sides. This is not the kind of war we wanted to prepare for. You would think that Somalia would have given us a great example to learn from in terms of body armor and protection for soldiers. And yet a decade later, our soldiers were still wearing the same kind of armor when they went into Iraq (active service units; national guard and reserves wear Vietnam-era armor).

Again, the bias against fighting this kind of war is seen by the fact that we did not immediately cut funding for the SeaWolf, ballistic missile defense, or even space defense simulations (over the entire lifetimes of the first two programs, nearly $100 billion has been spent).

Of course, that's not all that there is to it. I really ought to have blogged about this before, but the Pentagon has a special method for who gets how much and use this strategy to tailor their requests to get the maximum amount of money. Fred Kaplan at Slate.com has a great article about it.
Sadly, it's the living, breathing soldiers who pay the ultimate price for such institutional arrogance.