Armor This

Suddenly, the armored Humvee is is the cause celebre among people who, a year ago, thought the term Armored Humvee was something pertaining to the impeachment of Clinton.

The latest National Review editorial notes the context in which the issue exists, starting with last week's tempest in the hummus container:

None of this is to say that [the planted question to Rumsfeld about the issue at the Q and A session with the troops] wasn't a fair one, and — judging by the reaction it got from the troops — one that is understandably much on their minds. Every armchair general now knows we need more up-armored Humvees. But as Rumsfeld put it, in a statement that caused much media heartburn, you go to war with the army you have, and ours has yet to be truly transformed to deal with 21st-century threats.

Remember: When Rumsfeld showed up at the Pentagon for his second stint as secretary of Defense, the army was hell-bent on building the Crusader, a "mobile" artillery system that couldn't even fit into a C-130 transport plane. It wanted to build the Comanche helicopter, an aircraft conceived in 1983 with our Soviet adversary in mind. The army was caught in a bad Cold War flashback. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year, "Even as the armored Humvee proved itself in small conflicts around the globe, the Army failed to buy more because it was focused on preparing for major wars with other large armies — rather than low-end guerrilla conflicts."

Remember - in May of 2003, the US military had to switch between two vastly different types of war.

The first phase - the one whose mission President Bush rightly declared accomplished on the deck of the USS Lincoln - was a "hot war" different only in scale and pace from the one envisioned against the Soviets twenty years earlier; it differed only in the particulars from the one we waged a decade and change earlier in Kuwait; a war that perfected the Blitzkrieg originally envisioned by Liddell-Hart in the twenties and Guderian in the thirties. We took a heavy, mechanized force with heavy air support, and we out-thought, out-maneuvered, out-paced, and when good and ready, out-gunned the enemy, also a (putatively) modern, mechanized army. It's the kind of war where armored Humvees don't much matter, because if everyone's doing their job, Humvees are only getting shot at very rarely. An enemy who's trying to keep from getting immolated by F-16s, perforated by A-10s, shelled by M-109s, having his tanks torn apart by M-1s two miles away in the dark, isn't going to care about Humvees.

Then came the next phase - the sort of low-intensity (to outsiders) guerrilla battle that we've been fighting ever since. Contrary to the left's tropes, it's a war we fight very well; remember Afghanistan? It's a type of war that requires patience, political will (the left continues to forget that the military won nearly ever battle in Vietnam; the failure there was strategic and political), and being able to not only react to changes quickly and effectively, but to be able to drive the enemy's decisions rather than be driven by them. In that last sentence are subjects for a dozen posts.

But as re the Humvees:

Once improvised explosive devices began to take their awful toll, the U.S. military did all you can ask from a military force encountering an innovative and persistent enemy — it adjusted to circumstances. First, the Pentagon sent up-armored Humvees from around the world to the Iraqi theater. Then, it started producing more of the up-armored Humvees, a specially manufactured vehicle that provides the most protection to its occupants and heretofore was typically provided to military police. As a second-best option, it began using specially manufactured add-on kits to beef up a vehicle's armor, although this doesn't protect against explosions beneath the vehicle. And as a last resort, it began adding non-manufactured steel plates to some vehicles.

According to General Steven Whitcomb, who is in charge of ground troops in Iraq, commanders in Iraq want 8,100 up-armored Humvees. The military has produced 6,000 so far, and is churning out more than 400 more per month. Roughly 10,000 Humvees have been fitted with add-on kits. So, of the 19,000 or so Humvees in theater, 15,000 have some form of protection. Of 30,000 total wheeled vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly 22,000 have some sort of armor. Whitcomb relates that the last full brigade that deployed into Iraq from Kuwait had roughly 1,000 wheeled vehicles and almost every one of them had armored protection of some sort. Vehicles without armor are now typically loaded onto military trucks and driven into Iraq that way.

The armored Humvee was a G-list priority before the war, and until the past few weeks got to the B-list, at the very furthest. Why?

Is it frustrating that only 400-something up-armored Humvees are being produced a month? Yes. Some combination of the contractors' manufacturing capacity, the congressional-funding process, and the complexity of the military's contracting system are responsible. We wish the Pentagon leadership had more vigorously applied its creativity to this problem. Of course, it is not impossible to imagine, had, say, the contracting process been short-circuited, a hue-and-cry going up about some company's "sweetheart deal" to produce Humvees. And perhaps reporters would now be attempting to get soldiers to ask Rumsfeld about that.

Perhaps? It's happened already; attempts to short-circuit the military contracting system, as well as the Army's procurement process (which makes the Food and Drug Administration look drunk with youthful recklessness by comparison) have drawn the ire of competing businesses and the media.

Posted by Mitch at December 13, 2004 04:35 AM | TrackBack