Army officer says efforts under way to armor Humvees
"This is a very, very expensive proposition," says Army's director of force development.
The Army has obligated $4.1 billion to put additional armor on Humvees and lightweight vehicles operating under fire in Iraq and is doing everything it can to get more armored tactical vehicles to the battlefield, Maj. Gen. Stephen Speakes told reporters Wednesday.
"This is a very, very expensive proposition," said Speakes, the Army's director of force development, adding that the funding does not cover other needs such as body armor, weapons, night-vision equipment and other technologies.
The news conference at the Pentagon came on the heels of a media blitz after soldiers questioned the Pentagon's effort to adequately protect troops under attack in Iraq at a town hall meeting held by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in Kuwait last week.
In addition to armor, Speakes said service officials are looking at new tactics and procedures that could be employed to thwart insurgent ambushes, as well as new technologies that could prevent such attacks in the first place.
Speakes asserted that, despite the considerable cost of armoring vehicles in Iraq, the Army's challenge in meeting new and anticipated requirements is not money; top Pentagon leaders and lawmakers, he said, have provided ample funding to meet the Army's needs in Iraq.
Part of the problem, according to Brig. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson, is that even as U.S. armored vehicle manufacturers are working at maximum capacity to meet the Army's increased requirement, the speed with which sub-vendors can supply needed parts limits to some degree the prime contractors' ability to produce vehicles and armor kits.
"This isn't Wal-Mart," Sorenson, the Army's director of acquisition management, said during the briefing.
He added that currently 80 percent of the Army's Humvees and other vehicles are produced with additional armor when built, hardened with add-on armor kits or armored with steel and bulletproof glass salvaged by soldiers in Iraq.
He said the goal now is to see that 98 percent of Army vehicles there have some kind of armor by March. Still, Speakes added, "We'll never build enough armor to deny the enemy the ability to inflict damage on us."