Editorial: Get those factories churning

Saturday, Sept. 22, 2007 | 7:43 a.m.

The false information that President Bush used in justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq was the first tragedy of the war. The second tragedy was ordering the invasion before our military forces were prepared.

That unpreparedness revealed itself shortly after Baghdad fell, when our troops patrolling the country in flat-bottomed, lightly armored Humvees found themselves unprotected against explosives planted along their routes.

Seventy percent of all American casualties in Iraq, and 40 percent of American deaths there, are attributed to explosives or the even more deadly "explosively formed penetrators."

Although the design and technology for a far safer patrol vehicle have been around since the 1970s, it was not a part of the U.S. military's inventory in 2003.

And it has only been since earlier this year that the vehicle, known as MRAP (for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) has been manufactured in significant numbers. A Marine Corps general had urgently requested full production of the vehicles in February 2005, but the request was put off.

It was the lack of armor that prompted a soldier in 2004 to ask then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld why troops in Kuwait, awaiting orders to move into Iraq, had to scavenge in landfills for materials to upgrade their Humvees.

Rumsfeld answered famously that, "You go to war with the Army you have ..." and explained that supplying appropriate armor "is a matter of production" that Army leaders were working on.

In other words, the Army was sent into battle first, with production of appropriate armor to begin later .

But even "armor kits" eventually manufactured for the Humvees proved ineffective. So the Army ordered 2,500 MRAPs , and production began this year. In May, after Defense Secretary Robert Gates said MRAPs were his highest priority, the Army ordered 17,700 of the vehicles, enough to replace all its Humvees in Iraq.

On Wednesday, however, USA Today reported that the Army, without explaining why, had cut its order to 10,000.

On the same day, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, reintroduced bipartisan legislation that would fund the replacement of all Humvees in Iraq with MRAPs.

The bill amounts to about $25 billion, which is nothing in light of military assessments that MRAPs, fully deployed, could cut American casualties by as much as 80 percent.

Before the first soldier set foot in Iraq, Bush should have foreseen the military need for ramped-up production of heavily armored and properly designed vehicles. It's way late, but we say bring as many factories on line as are needed, hire three shifts and get our troops the protection they deserve.