A spokesman for the Defense Department Inspector General's office told me on Tuesday that they will conduct an inquiry into the multi-year delay in purchasing mine-resistant vehicles for Marines serving in Iraq. In a letter dated Feb. 20, the Marine Corps requested the Inspector General to investigate allegations that the delays led to hundreds of casualties for Marines serving in Iraq. The spokesman, Gary Comerford, said that within a few days the DoD IG will formally announce an audit, or review, of MRAP purchases for Iraq.
The long delay in ordering MRAPs and the resulting casualties for combat troops is a huge scandal. It's also emblematic of many other Bush administration failures in Iraq, especially its seeming indifference to the welfare of troops caught in the middle of a prolonged civil war.
Shockingly, the scandal never has been investigated adequately. Although a House Armed Services subcommittee did hold MRAP hearings last July, these concentrated on how many mine-resistant vehicles were needed to the exclusion of that other critical topic, the causes and results of the delays. As Chairman Gene Taylor described the intent of those hearings...
...dwelling on past mistakes is not going to help at all in increasing the production of MRAPs.
Meanwhile, Robert Gates' Pentagon is so determined to portray its new MRAP acquisition program positively that it prefers to forget its years of indifference to urgent requests from field commanders. Gates is not eager to expose what went wrong. In part, it's a question of shielding the White House from blame for minimizing the danger presented by the Iraqi insurgency.
One reason officials put off buying MRAPs in significant quantities: They never expected the war to last this long. President Bush set the tone on May 1, 2003, six weeks after the U.S. invasion, when he declared on board the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."
The absence of investigations is a scandal in its own right. Pressure has been building in some quarters within the military to expose why the Pentagon failed to respond sooner even as casualties from IEDs skyrocketed. In particular retired Marine officer Franz Gayl has been pushing hard to expose the Corps' failures in acquiring needed equipment. Now a civilian technology adviser for the Marines, he filed last May for whistleblower protection because of reprisals after he met with congressional staffers. Senators Biden and Bond rebuked the Corps last September for "apparent retaliation" against him.
The Marines finally decided to accept a proposal that Gayl write a report about their recent failures in procurement. Gayl's study (PDF), completed on Jan. 22, catalogued a wide range of problems in the Marine Corps and Pentagon procurement programs.
The study...accuses the service of "gross mismanagement" that delayed deliveries of the mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks for more than two years.
Cost was a driving factor in the decision to turn down the request for the so-called MRAPs, according to the study. Stateside authorities saw the hulking vehicles, which can cost as much as a $1 million each, as a financial threat to programs aimed at developing lighter vehicles that were years from being fielded [the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle]...
"If the mass procurement and fielding of MRAPs had begun in 2005 in response to the known and acknowledged threats at that time, as the (Marine Corps) is doing today, hundreds of deaths and injuries could have been prevented," writes Gayl, the science and technology adviser to Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, who heads the department. "While the possibility of individual corruption remains undetermined, the existence of corrupted MRAP processes is likely, and worthy of (inspector general) investigation."
Evidently the Marines weren't entirely eager to facilitate this study:
Gayl, who has clashed with his superiors in the past and filed for whistle-blower protection last year, uses official Marine Corps documents, e-mails, briefing charts, memos, congressional testimony, and news articles to make his case. He was not allowed to interview or correspond with any employees connected to the Combat Development Command.
USA Today reports now that the Marines are blocking Gayle from pursuing the matter further.
"He's been told to stop any further work," said Col. David Lapan, a Marine spokesman. "It's gotten beyond its initial purpose."
Lapan said Gayl exceeded his authority by writing about MRAPs because the proposal that requested the report never specifically mentioned the new armored vehicles by name.
That may not be true (a representative of the Government Accountability Project quoted by the paper says it's false). In any event, Gayl's report concluded that deaths from IEDs in Iraq could have been cut by 50% if a 2005 Marine request for MRAPs had been granted. He also points out that the Commandant of the Marine Corps misled Congress last year about the scandal.
The report also says that Marine Gen. James Conway, the Corps commandant, provided Congress with "incomplete and inaccurate" information last year when he said field commanders had not expressed a strong desire for MRAPs. He was relying on erroneous input from the procurement officers who had delayed acting on the requests, the report says.
The Marines repeatedly distanced themselves from the report at first, advising the AP that it is "not an official study or report". But on Feb. 17 Senators Biden and Bond called on the Pentagon to investigate Gayl's allegations.
"This is a stark warning that the military brass back home is not acting on needs of our war fighters," Biden said in a written statement. "We need an official investigation to figure out why this happened and to make sure it never happens again."
And thus three days later the Marines had decided to ask the Pentagon Inspector General to investigate the substance of Gayl's report "because of the seriousness of the allegations". That request has been accepted now, according to the OIG spokesman.
Incidentally, there have been no major audits related to Iraq initiated by DoD OIG for more than a year, to judge by this summary of ongoing projects. It's a remarkable gap, given that new projects were added throughout the years 2005 and 2006. Yet not a single new Iraq project has been added since Claude Kicklighter became Inspector General last April.
I hope and trust that DoD OIG will pursue the MRAP investigation vigorously, but in any case a full audit will take a long time to complete. In the meantime, as Nick Schwellenbach has been urging, Congress really ought to hold hearings into how and why this fiasco occurred, and what the consequences were for our troops in Iraq.
"Gayl's report of the failure of the Marine Corps acquisition system to respond timely to urgent requests for MRAPs from Marines in Iraq is a critical case study," said Nick Schwellenbach, national security investigator at the Project On Government Oversight (POGO), adding, "This isn't a case of hindsight being 20-20—requests for MRAPs by people fighting were made, were ignored by bureaucrats for years, and thus lives were lost. Hearings need to be held and the process improved or lives may be unnecessarily lost again in the future."
Such hearings are long overdue, in fact. I'd urge you to contact Sen. Carl Levin and other members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and ask them to schedule hearings into the causes and results of the delays in acquiring mine-resistant vehicles for our troops in Iraq.
At 3 PM on Wednesday, anyhow, three Marine Generals are appearing before the House Armed Services subcommittee on Seapower. They should be grilled about the Gayl report's findings.