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When military leaders like General LeMay and Claire Chennault went into 
battle this couldn't happen.  When a President and Pentagon leaders 
cower behind desks and bray about their military prowess, the grunts die 
for their dishonesty.



The New York Times
------------------------------------------------------------------------


         October 30, 2004

*PROTECTING TROOPS*


   Along With Prayers, Families Send Armor

*By NEELA BANERJEE and JOHN KIFNER*

When the 1544th Transportation Company of the Illinois National Guard 
was preparing to leave for Iraq in February, relatives of the soldiers 
offered to pay to weld steel plates on the unit's trucks to protect 
against roadside bombs. The Army told them not to, because it would 
provide better protection in Iraq, relatives said.

Seven months later, many of the company's trucks still have no armor, 
soldiers and relatives said, despite running some of the most dangerous 
missions in Iraq and incurring the highest rate of injuries and deaths 
among the Illinois units deployed there.

"This problem is very extensive," said Paul Rieckhoff, a former infantry 
platoon leader with the Florida National Guard in Iraq who now runs an 
organization called Operation Truth, an advocacy group for soldiers and 
veterans.

Though soldiers of all types have complained about equipment in Iraq, 
part-timers in the National Guard and Reserve say that they have a 
particular disadvantage because they start off with outdated or 
insufficient gear. They have been deployed with faulty radios, 
unreliable trucks and, most alarmingly for many, a shortage of soundly 
armored vehicles in a land regularly convulsed by roadside attacks, 
according to soldiers, relatives and outside military experts.

After many complaints when the violence in Iraq accelerated late last 
year, the military acknowledged there had been shortages, in part 
because of the rapid deployments. But the Army contends that it has 
moved quickly to get better equipment to Iraq over the last year.

"War is a come-as-you-are party," said Lt. Gen. C. V. Christianson, the 
Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics, in an interview yesterday. 
"The way a unit was resourced when someone rang the bell is the way it 
showed up.

"As we saw this become a more enduring commitment, those in the next 
rotation had full protective gear, like the newest body armor," he said. 
General Christianson acknowledged, however, that more work needed to be 
done to protect vehicles in particular and that broader changes were 
needed so that the Army and Reserve would be better prepared in the future.

Not all National Guard units are complaining about their equipment. The 
soldiers in Company C of the Arkansas Army National Guard's First 
Battalion, 153rd Infantry Regiment, have operated in one of the riskiest 
parts of Baghdad since they arrived in April.

Capt. Thomas J. Foley, 29, the company commander, and his soldiers 
bragged in recent interviews that their equipment, from Bradley fighting 
vehicles to armored personnel carriers, was on par or better than what 
many regular Army units in Iraq now have.

The improvements are of little solace to many soldiers' families. 
Progress has been made, but it has been slow and inconsistent, soldiers, 
families and other military observers said. When 18 reservists in Iraq 
refused an order to deliver fuel on Oct. 13, they cited the poor 
condition of their trucks and the lack of armed escorts in a 
particularly dangerous area.

*Families Buy Equipment*

Before the 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard left 
in late February, some relatives bought those soldiers new body armor to 
supplant the Vietnam-era flak jackets that had been issued. The mother 
of Sgt. Sherwood Baker, a member of the regiment who was killed in 
April, bought a global positioning device after being told that the Army 
said his truck should have one but would not supply it.

And before Karma Kumlin's husband left with his Minnesota National Guard 
unit in February, the soldiers spent about $200 each on radios that they 
say have turned out to be more reliable - although less secure - than 
the Army's. Only recently, Ms. Kumlin said, has her husband gotten a 
metal shield for the gunner's turret he regularly mans, after months of 
asking.

"This just points to an extreme lack of planning ," said Ms. Kumlin, who 
is 31 and a student. "My husband is part of the second wave that went to 
Iraq."

Critics who say that disparities and shortages persist fault the 
Pentagon for incorrectly assuming that American troops would return home 
quickly after the war. As a result, they say, little was done to equip 
and train the thousands of National Guard and Reserve soldiers who were 
called to serve in Iraq and who now make up 40 percent of American 
troops there.

"I am really surprised that planners relied on the best-case military 
scenario," said Jonathon Turley, a military historian at George 
Washington University Law School who wrote last year about shortages of 
body armor. He was then deluged with e-mail messages from soldiers 
complaining of such shortages, 90 percent of them from the National 
Guard and Reserve.

Military officials strongly dispute assertions that reservists and 
National Guard troops have training and equipment inferior to that of 
the regular Army. "The resourcing and equipping of the National Guard 
today is indistinguishable from that of active duty soldiers," said Lt. 
Gen. H Steven Blum. "In no time in history have soldiers gone to battle 
as well equipped as they have gone into Iraq."

Structured like the regular Army, the National Guard functions as a 
state militia, typically called out for natural disasters or civil 
disorder. The Reserve, in contrast, is largely composed of support 
elements like civil affairs, the military police and supply. Both groups 
train one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. The rest of the 
military does not consider them as well trained, well equipped or well 
led as the standing Army, and many of these part-time soldiers are also 
older.

*Reliance on Reserves*

Under a reorganization of the military after the Vietnam War, support 
functions were passed from the Army to the Reserve. Historians say the 
idea was to protect the Army from being sent into another unpopular war 
because widespread support would be needed to call up the reserves.

In his biography of Gen. Creighton Abrams, "Thunderbolt" (Simon & 
Schuster, 1992), Lewis Sorley wrote than General Abrams built into the 
restructuring "a reliance on reserves such that the force could not 
function without them, and hence could not be deployed without calling 
them up."

The reliance on the Reserve and National Guard also increased with the 
shrinking of the active military from roughly 2.1 million at the end of 
the Persian Gulf war to some 1.4 million today.

But for years, under what is called the Tiered Resourcing System, new 
equipment went to those most likely to need it - the active Army - while 
the Reserve and the Guard got the hand-me-downs.

"In addition to personnel shortfalls, most Army Guard units are not 
provided all the equipment they need for their wartime requirements," 
said Janet A. St. Laurent of the General Accounting Office in testimony 
before Congress in April. Ms. St. Laurent noted that many Guard units 
had radios so old that they could not communicate with newer ones, and 
trucks so old that the Army lacked spare parts for them.

Army officials concede that the old approach to training and equipping 
the Guard and Reserve did not prepare them for the new realities of 
Iraq. Progress appears to have been made in providing modern body armor 
and some other equipment, families and soldiers say.

The Army says it is on schedule to armor all its Humvees in Iraq by 
April 2005, despite the fact that only one factory in the United States 
puts armor on the vehicles. Moreover, the Guard is developing a plan to 
heighten the training and preparedness of its soldiers, under which a 
given unit could expect to be deployed every six years.

But the glaring problem for soldiers and families remains the 
vulnerability of trucks. In a conventional war there would be a fixed 
front line and no need for supply trucks to be armored. But in Iraq, 
there are no clear front lines, and slow-moving truck convoys are prime 
targets for roadside attacks.

Gen. James E. Chambers, the commander of the 13th Corps Support Command, 
to which the recalcitrant soldiers who refused the assignment are 
attached, told a news conference in Baghdad: "In Jim Chambers' s 
opinion, the most dangerous job in Iraq is driving a truck. It's not if, 
but when, they will be attacked."

Of the Illinois National Guard units now in Iraq, none of the 11 units 
has suffered as many casualties as the 1544th Transportation Company. Of 
the approximately 170 men and women in the unit, 5 have been killed and 
32 wounded since the unit arrived in Iraq in March and began delivering 
supplies and mail and providing armed escort to civilian convoys.

Three of the soldiers died during mortar attacks on their base south of 
Baghdad. The other two were killed when roadside bombs exploded next to 
their unarmored trucks. Soldiers' relatives said that they expected the 
Army to outfit the trucks better than they themselves could have, after 
being told by the military that the steel plates proposed by the 
families would shatter if hit.

But in fact, most of the trucks in the unit have nothing more than the 
steel plates that the families offered to have installed in the first 
place, said Lt. Col. Alicia Tate-Nadeau, a spokeswoman for the Illinois 
Guard.

*3 Meanings of Armored*

The Army considers the 1544th's vehicles armored, a word that has a 
broad and loose meaning in the Iraq conflict. There are three categories 
of armored vehicles, Colonel Tate-Nadeau said. The "up-armored" ones 
come that way from the factory and provide the best protection for 
soldiers. Then come vehicles outfitted with "armor kits," or 
prefabricated pieces, on the chassis. The last option consists of 
"whatever the soldiers try to do themselves, from large sheets of metal 
on their trucks to sandbags on the floor of the cab," Colonel 
Tate-Nadeau said.

"If we're one of the richest nations in the world, our soldiers 
shouldn't be sent out looking like the Beverly Hillbillies," said the 
mother of one soldier in the unit, who, like many parents, asked not to 
be identified for fear of repercussions for their children.

According to figures compiled by the House Armed Services Committee and 
previously reported in The Seattle Times, there are plans to produce 
armor kits for at least 2,806 medium-weight trucks, but as of Sept. 17, 
only 385 of the kits had been produced and sent to Iraq. Armor kits were 
also planned for at least 1,600 heavyweight trucks, but as of 
mid-September just 446 of these kits were in Iraq. The Army is also 
looking into developing ways to armor truck cabs quickly, and has 
ordered 700 armored Humvees with special weapons platforms to protect 
convoys.

Specialist Benjamin Isenberg, 27, of the Oregon National Guard, died on 
Sept. 13 when he drove his unarmored Humvee over a homemade bomb, the 
principal weapon of the insurgents, said his grandmother, Beverly 
Isenberg of McArthur, Calif. The incident occurred near Taji, the town 
north of Baghdad where the 18 reservists refused to make a second trip 
with fuel that they say had been rejected as contaminated.

"One of the soldiers in his unit said they go by the same routes and at 
the same times every day," said Mrs. Isenberg, whose husband is a 
retired Army officer and who has two sons in the military and another 
grandson in the Special Forces who was wounded in Iraq. "They were just 
sitting ducks in an unarmored Humvee."

/Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting for this article./


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