Unforgivable
Sen. Clinton demands an inquiry into inadequate body armor for troops
in Iraq


First published: Thursday, January 12, 2006

What is the life of a Marine or soldier worth these days in Iraq?
About $260, to judge from a secret Defense Department study that was
the topic of a New York Times article reprinted in this newspaper
Saturday. The $260 represents the cost of supplying one soldier or
Marine with adequately designed ceramic armor plates that prevent
fatal wounds in the torso or shoulders -- body armor that, until
recently, U.S. troops lacked.

The study is shocking. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton is right
to call for Senate Armed Services Committee hearings into the
allegations raised in the report, as well as a General Accountability
Office investigation into the procurement guidelines that were
followed in arriving at the design.

The Pentagon study, completed last summer, examined the deaths of 93
Marines who suffered upper body wounds in Iraq between 2003 and 2005.
It concluded that a better designed armored vest could have saved 74
of them, or 80 percent. The number would be much higher if Army deaths
had also been included in the study.

For the moment, the only explanation the military has for purchasing
inadequately designed body armor is that a larger vest capable of
protecting the torso and shoulders would have been too cumbersome for
troops in the field. But that argument is a thin one, given that the
Marine Corps began to order the better designed vests once the study
results were known.

Regrettably, even now there is a lag in getting the better vests to
the troops. The New York Times reports that as of December, less than
10 percent of 28,000 ceramic vests had been issued to Marines in Iraq.
Army troops face even longer delays.

In what can only be seen as a cruel irony, news of the Pentagon study
came at about the same time that the chief executive of a company that
makes bulletproof vests for the military was throwing a lavish party
for his daughter and her friends in Manhattan. According to the Times,
the executive, David Brooks, went from earning $525,000 a year before
the Iraq war to making $70 million in 2004, while collecting an
additional $186 million in 2004 selling company stock. All this even
as 18,000 of his company's vests, including some used by troops in
Iraq, were being recalled in November after federal safety tests
raised questions about their effectiveness.

Neither Mr. Brooks nor his company can be held accountable for the
design of the vest, of course. That is something the Pentagon decides.
But the huge disparity between what the Pentagon pays for body armor,
and then cuts corners in design, is troubling. Certainly skimping on
$260 for troops in harm's way is, to use Sen. Clinton's word,
unforgivable. It's also unconscionable.

http://timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=438898&category=OPIN
ION&BCCode=&newsdate=1/12/2006