defense watch

September 2007

Why the Mightiest Military Can’t Get Enough Trucks

By Sandra I. Erwin

The political circus that has surrounded the procurement of mine-resistant armored vehicles for troops in Iraq comes as no surprise. It is yet another reminder of how the military continues to be shortchanged by the Bush administration’s determination to not let the war get in the way of business as usual.

First came the shortage of body armor, followed by inadequate quantities of armored humvees and insufficient numbers of bomb-jamming devices. Before the war, none of these items was in mass production and it took about two years to ramp up the industrial base to meet the demand.

The latest example is the mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, or MRAP, which had an assembly line that produced 15 trucks per month up until a year ago. The services say they need thousands.

Following a wave of media coverage and congressional griping about the Pentagon’s perceived slow response to the MRAP shortages, Defense Secretary Robert Gates created a special “task force” to accelerate the production of vehicles.

But even under the best-case scenario, it will take 18 to 24 months to fill the requests from deployed commanders — possibly too little, too late if a drawdown begins next year. Asked why the Pentagon didn’t start buying vehicles sooner, officials point out that nobody could have predicted how much more lethal roadside bombs in Iraq would become.

Regardless of how slowly (or quickly, depending on whom you ask) the Pentagon reacted to the MRAP crisis, the controversy speaks volumes about how the military is fighting a war while the rest of the country remains comfortably unburdened. MRAPs, by the Pentagon’s own account, are just trucks — hulking boxes that South African firms have been building for three decades.

But up until three months ago, the United States only had one “warm” production line for MRAPs. That one company, Force Protection Inc., was too small to handle large orders and had to partner with bigger defense contractors to expand production. Other manufacturers are setting up assembly lines, but the process will be anything but smooth.

“To be clear, in virtually every case, the MRAP companies will face challenges in increasing their rates of production, which means qualifying suppliers, increasing supply and manufacturing capacity, hiring and training workers and providing manufacturing facilities,” said John Young, who chairs the Pentagon’s MRAP task force. “We may encounter manufacturing, spare parts, and maintenance issues as we accelerate … This is an extremely aggressive program and the Defense Department is accepting risk,” Young said.

Risk, in this case, equals an unknown number of lives.

The outrage on Capitol Hill, predictably, is being directed at the easy targets — the procurement bureaucracy, the suppliers of raw materials, the manufacturers.

Admittedly, those in charge of the program are doing the best they can under the circumstances. The larger problem, of which MRAP is just one component, is that only 1 percent of the nation’s citizens — the military services — are bearing 100 percent of the risk in this war. Otherwise, how to explain the ordeal associated with having to buy a few thousand trucks?

Some of the blame could be cast on the Pentagon’s laissez-faire industrial policy, which discourages suppliers from investing in defense-unique production facilities. If the Pentagon is struggling this much to build a few thousand relatively low-tech trucks, how could it handle the ramp up of more complex pieces of machinery?

Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, often has questioned the Pentagon’s lackadaisical industrial policy, but his pleas mostly have been dismissed as outdated Cold War thinking.

“Some of the big truck manufacturers don’t want to get into this because we don’t have capital budgeting,” Abercrombie said at a House hearing. Manufacturers are thinking, “That’s great, yeah, we make these MRAP vehicles for a year-and-a-half and then the contract disappears and we’re left holding the bag, so we don’t want to get into it in the first place.”

Ironically, those manufacturers that have defense-unique production lines are penalized by Wall Street when other competitors emerge to challenge their market share. Force Protection Inc.’s stock soared when it was the only MRAP manufacturer but took a dive when the Pentagon decided to bring other companies into the fold.

The Defense Department by law can secure access to critical supplies such as steel. But delivering thousands of MRAPs on such a short timeline almost would require the Pentagon to take over commercial production lines. Rep. Gene Taylor, R-Miss., asked Young if the Defense Department has the “legal authority to go to an automotive or a truck plant and say, ‘Our nation needs your assembly line to make this product.’” Young said he did not know.

A broader dilemma for Congress is whether it should even take such drastic measures when most of their constituents are indifferent to the problem. “I applaud the urgency of dealing with this, but I think the bigger issue from a civil military standpoint — the military is carrying out its mission, but do the American people understand?” asked Rep. Geoff Davis, R-Ky.

The answer is a resounding no, said Abercrombie. “We are not fighting a war … The country’s mostly watching TV and concerned about whether baseball players are on steroids.”

Please email your comments to SErwin@ndia.org

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