[Laracroft]

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'Hillbilly Armor'
Defense sees it's fallen short in securing the troops. The grunts already
knew.

Dec. 20 issue - Predators know to hunt the weakest animal in the herd. So do
the Iraqi insurgents. It is an essential truth about the Iraq war that's
ingrained in soldiers like Pvt. Daniel Rocco, a Humvee gunner with the
Second Battalion of the 82nd Field Artillery Regiment. Rocco's unit is an
artillery regiment trained for conventional warfare, not escorting convoys.
But the "Steel Dragons" of the Second now spend most of their days
protecting the weak: VIP visitors and 18-wheel trucks loaded with food or
other supplies on the road to Baghdad. In the process Rocco's unit gets hit
regularly with small-arms fire, improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and even
suicide car bombs. He displays reddish pockmarks and scar tissue up his
right arm, the effects of an IED from last May. "I really can't close my
right hand," he says. And Rocco's Humvee is, today, equipped-with "Gypsy
racks"-steel-plated cages around the gunner-and other add-on, improvised
hardware, known as "hillbilly armor." "It's Mel Gibson 'Road Warrior'
stuff," says Capt. John Pinter, the battalion's maintenance officer. "We're
not shooting for pretty over here."




This is the ugly reality that National Guard Spc. Thomas Wilson was
apparently trying to convey to Donald Rumsfeld in Kuwait last week. There is
no front line in Iraq. Or, to be more precise, the front line is wherever
the insurgents decide it is. And very often they decide it should be trucks
and unarmored Humvees at the back of supply lines-what used to be known, in
other wars, as the rear area. Because the insurgents present a 360-degree
threat, the most vulnerable units are often the ones the Army pays the least
attention to: poorly equipped National Guardsmen or reservists in supply and
transport companies. During a Q&A while the Defense secretary was stopping
off in Kuwait, Wilson asked Rumsfeld: "Why do we soldiers have to dig
through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic
glass to up-armor our vehicles?"

Rumsfeld's initial response was testy. "You go to war with the army you
have," he barked. Wilson's question, it turned out, had been planted by a
reporter embedded with Wilson's 278th Regimental Combat Team, which was
about to head into Iraq in a long convoy of unarmored vehicles. But Wilson's
brave words brought applause and shouts of approval from the other 2,300
soldiers in the hangar at a base in Kuwait.

His question is still resonating. Many critics on both sides of the
political aisle are asking whether the Pentagon is adjusting well to the
insurgents' tactics. Is Rumsfeld, in other words, fixing vulnerabilities as
quickly as the Iraqi insurgents spot them? President Bush reassured
Americans last week that "we're doing everything we possibly can to protect
your loved ones in a mission which is vital and important." But as the death
toll climbs to nearly 1,300, some soldiers and defense-industry officials
insist that much more could be done. Eighteen months after Bush declared
that "major combat operations" in Iraq were over-and another war began-the
most powerful military machine on the planet, replenished by America's
unmatched industrial power, is still sending its soldiers, reservists and
National Guardsmen down dangerous roads in soft-skinned trucks and Humvees.

Humvee factories, meanwhile, have not been operating at full capacity. And
U.S. commercial steel-plate companies have been largely ignored by the
Pentagon, which remains intent on supplying itself from a select number of
Army depots. Perhaps inadvertently, the Pentagon late last week provided
proof that it had not been doing its utmost. Two days after Rumsfeld's
embarrassing exchange with Wilson, the Defense Department announced it was
ordering 100 more up-armored Humvees a month from their main supplier,
O'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt in West Chester, Ohio. The Humvee armoring company
had told reporters only a few days before that it was operating at 22
percent under capacity, but that there were no more orders from the
Pentagon. Then suddenly there were more, for reasons the Army did not make
clear. (The Pentagon claims it did not know about the additional capacity
until the head of O'Gara's holding company, Armor Holdings of Jacksonville,
Fla., announced last week that it was possible.) The new Pentagon order
boosts production from 450 to 550 up-armored Humvees a month, neatly filling
in O'Gara's capacity gap.

Every little bit of additional production will help. Of the 19,782 Humvees
currently in the Iraq theater, according to the Army's latest numbers, only
a little more than a quarter, or 5,910, are the new M-1114 model, which is
armored top to bottom and can withstand the weight because it has an
improved transmission, a 6.5-liter turbo diesel engine and a tougher
chassis. An additional 4,737 Humvees have no armor, and most of the rest
have been modified with add-on kits. The problem is that these add-on
Humvees sometimes break down under the weight or move too slowly in
dangerous situations. "The modified armor makes vehicles slog," explains
Pinter. And do-it-yourself hillbilly armor sometimes makes the vehicles less
safe, especially when exposed to bombs. Why? Because poor-quality steel can
turn into shrapnel.

There are no firm figures on how many soldiers have died or suffered
grievous wounds because of lack of armor. But even during the recent
Fallujah offensive, several Marine infantry units rolled into battle with
soft-skinned and open-backed Humvees. Many of the Marines grumbled that all
the armor was being sent over to the Army. But some Army troops wouldn't
agree: in October, members of one unarmored unit, the 343rd Quartermaster
Company, refused to carry out a convoy mission because their vehicles were
not adequately protected. Several members were later disciplined and
demoted, though the Army declined to court-martial them. In a recent letter
to the Army Times, Sgt. Scott Montgomery, who was part of a different unit
that eventually did carry out the mission, said his convey was hit by an IED
and that he was wounded by shrapnel. "Had we not had armor on our vehicle,
my entire crew would have been killed," he said.

Rumsfeld arrived at the Pentagon determined to overhaul an antiquated Army,
making it smaller, faster, lighter, but every bit as lethal. He succeeded,
at least in the early going. Following the "shock and awe" bombing campaign,
Rumsfeld's faster, lighter forces stunned the enemy by rushing to Baghdad in
just three weeks.

But now an Army that has long wanted to retreat from heavy, slow tanks and
Bradleys, which it once designed for use against the Soviets, suddenly needs
them again. "If anyone would have told me a Humvee would be the platform of
choice in a war, I would have told them they're crazy," says Gary Motsek,
director of support operations for Army Materiel Command. His view was
echoed last week by former Army chief of staff Gen. Eric Shinseki, who told
an audience at California's Pomona College that Humvees were never intended
for combat. But Motsek says the Army has adjusted faster than many people
realize. Last fall, he notes, when the Army realized the gravity of the
insurgency, engineers at the Army Research Lab at Aberdeen, Md., designed
the add-on armor kits for the Humvees "over a weekend."

Dov Zakheim-who, until his recent departure, was the DoD's comptroller-told
NEWSWEEK that another holdup has been an "antiquated" acquisitions system.
Zakheim said the Pentagon fixed the problem only in the past six weeks with
"joint rapid action cells," which allow contractors to waive regulatory red
tape in wartime. Other Army officials complain that the nation does not have
the industrial base any longer to produce equipment for a new kind of war.
That's one reason so many supply trucks-seven out of eight, in fact-are
still unarmored. The Army's "family" of medium trucks is now made by a
single firm, Stewart & Stevenson of Sealy, Texas. All the features that make
trucks driver-friendly-like a big front window-also make it a nightmare to
drive on Iraq's lethal highways. So the Army has contracted both with its
own depots and with outside firms to build appliqué armor kits. But, as with
the Humvees, the extra weight can wreck suspensions and drive trains and
overtax the engine's coolant system. "The last thing you want is a
well-armored vehicle that breaks down," says Denny Dellinger, president of
Stewart & Stevenson. So he's designing a whole new armored cab. "The Army is
doing a helluva lot," Dellinger says, but the tactics of the insurgents
keeps changing.

Yet some critics contend that, contrary to what Rumsfeld told Wilson,
America is not going to war with the Army equipment it already has. They
claim that vested interests at the Pentagon are sometimes obstructing the
best firepower and equipment available. Why? In part because the Pentagon is
still obsessed with its "lighter, faster" vision and is hyping new,
ill-tested armaments like the Stryker fighting vehicle. Much older
equipment, like treaded M113 personnel carriers, lies unused in arms
"boneyards" although they could be up-armored far more cheaply than Humvees.

Among these second-guessers is Rep. Robin Hayes, a North Carolina
Republican. Hayes told NEWSWEEK that "the secretary of Defense exhibited a
remarkable lack of sensitivity" in his remarks. Hayes said he has been
frustrated by delays in getting several heavier armored gun carriers to the
light-gunned 82nd Airborne, which first requested them a year ago. Four such
tank-treaded vehicles are still sitting in mothballs in Pennsylvania. Army
Gen. Richard Cody approved the transfer last March. But then the Army
decided to wait for a newer system mounted on a wheeled Stryker, though the
system has been held up due to reliability issues, according to a recent
General Accounting Office report. On Dec. 9, a day after Rumsfeld's Kuwait
appearance, Hayes wrote him a letter saying, "I simply cannot understand why
we are not equipping our soldiers and Marines on the front lines with every
weapon in our arsenal."

Other defense insiders say that better armor has not been a high enough
priority, at least until recently. After 9/11, Boeing ramped up production
of JDAMs, its precise, GPS-guided bombs, from 900 a year to 3, 000 a month
for use in Afghanistan. (This past week, in the middle of the armor furor,
Boeing announced that it had delivered its 100,000th JDAM kit to the Air
Force.) "If they could do it for bombs, why couldn't they do it for armor to
save lives ?" asks Defense analyst Bill Arkin. Rumsfeld "could have awakened
any morning in the last year and a half, determined to make sure every
vehicle is properly armored and said, 'I want industry to jump through hoops
to do it'," says one defense contractor. "I was infuriated he could be so
cavalier." No doubt the Pentagon chief is getting on top of the problem now.

With Rod Nordland in Baghdad, T. Trent Gegax in New York and Eve Conant in
Washington