House panel seeks to speed up armor acquisition

House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., said he has accelerated efforts to acquire armor for military vehicles in the Middle East to resolve gaps in production.

During a congressional delegation visit last week to military bases in North Carolina and Texas, Hunter said the committee recently pushed to expedite the production of add-on armor kits for Humvees and other vehicles with $211 million in redirected Pentagon funding.

"The committee is now personally seeing armor kits going over to Kuwait," Hunter said.

The committee's action comes after the Pentagon last month hastened its efforts get more armor, ballistic glass and other critical, life-saving equipment to troops in Iraq.

Hunter said the committee also accelerated a Pentagon effort to properly armor military gun trucks used in Iraq. Previously, troops were using salvaged steel and ballistic glass to harden the vehicles.

"This is an illustration of the guys in the field having to do something that the acquisition system is unable to provide in a timely way," Hunter said. "Our job is to beat up this bureaucracy and get them to move this stuff out the door."

During the trip, Hunter and other members of the delegation, including Reps. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., Robin Hayes, R-N.C., Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., and Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said the lack of armor for Humvees and other vehicles was a common concern among soldiers and Marines at Ft. Bliss, Texas, and Camp Lejeune, N.C. But they asserted there are other shortfalls that must be addressed. Hunter said the committee recently shifted $161 million from the Pentagon's Iraqi Freedom Fund to pay for radio-signal jammers designed to stop devices set off by Iraq insurgents using remote control systems. The funds were shifted from the emergency pot of contingency funds in a recent reprogramming request.

"We held the reprogramming briefly in order to get their attention," Hunter said, suggesting initial resistance from Pentagon leaders to buying more jammers.

Army officials were unable to comment by presstime, but Hunter said the funding will help bridge a gap in jammer production until the administration sends its estimated $100 billion fiscal 2005 supplemental spending request to lawmakers this spring.

Marines at Camp Lejeune told the chairman they need larger quantities of spare parts and components for communications equipment used in Iraq. Hunter said Marines told him that while it might be easy to obtain these critical parts at bases in the United States, such equipment has been delayed in getting to troops in the field. Hunter also said that F-15 pilots at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, N.C. said they want more advanced targeting pods, commonly known as "Sniper Pods," a sophisticated and precise capability that uses laser and GPS applications.

"These Sniper Pods are apparently much clearer than the older pods," Hunter said. "We need to proliferate these pods and get more of them out in the field quickly."