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War? What war?

By Sean Aqui | Related entries in Bad Decisions, Foreign Policy, Military, News, War

I was listening to a radio interview today with a retired Marine, Col. Thomas X. Hammes, a noted authority on modern warfare. He’s on a promotion tour for his new book, “The Sling and the Stone”, a treatise on the (poor) U.S. response to modern guerrilla warfare.

The interview was interesting enough; but what struck me was a point he made at the outset. He said that the “Pentagon had never gone to war” in Iraq. When asked what that meant, he used the example of the Future Tactical Truck.

The FTT is intended, in part, to be a replacement for the Hummer, which has proven poorly suited for counterinsurgency operations. It’s underarmored, underpowered and ill-equipped, and a disproportionate share of U.S. casualties are incurred by troops using them.

Faced with these harsh realities, the Pentagon is moving to have the replacement ready by…. 2012.

As Hammes notes, that’s a peacetime development cycle. In a time when people are fighting and dying daily in underarmored Hummers, it’s a pace so leisurely it verges on criminal. If the same course had been followed in World War II, we would have fought the entire war with 37mm antitank guns and Grant light tanks. And lost.

Yet another sign, IMO, of how Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, three years in, never has taken the war in Iraq seriously.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 and is filed under Bad Decisions, Foreign Policy, Military, News, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “War? What war?”

Bob J Young Says:
December 2nd, 2006 at 12:46 pm
Boy do I agree with that. Big ticket, high tech pork, but damn little to help the actual troops. My aunt had to buy my cousin body armor at the start of the war. Now when troops get deployed, they are given a list of things they will need, that will not be issued (or the issued item is just crap and you need to buy a commercial version).

In fact, there is an interesting website dedicated to items you need for deployment.
http://kitup.military.com/

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