The Pentagon is making a big deal about Robert Gates' self-congratulatory speech on Friday at a South Carolina factory that builds Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles. DoD has not one but three stories related to this fake event, each one gushing about a program that was ramped up around four years later than it should have been.
Hard to say which is more outlandish, the fact that Gates had the gall to trumpet the Pentagon's success in quickly acquiring large numbers of MRAPs, or the corporate media reports that provided virtually no context about the Defense Department's miserable failure to actually acquire these desperately needed vehicles quickly. Here is Gates crowing during his tour of the factory:
"There have been so many aspects of this war where government and others have been subject to criticism. This is something that really went right," (Gates) said.
It was a glorious success story:
"For all of the talk about how Washington can't get anything done, this is an amazing example of Republicans, Democrats, the executive branch, the Congress, manufacturers, government bureaucrats, everybody pitching in and doing the right thing," he told reporters during the flight back to Washington.
Not one of the news reports about this PR spectacle bothered to ponder or assess how many servicemen were killed or maimed in Iraq while waiting for the Pentagon to send them MRAPs to replace their crappy humvees. What's more, these articles barely even acknowledge that any delay occurred at all. Though you'd never know it from reading these articles, it's a notorious scandal.
In fact it's a double scandal. First, Rumsfeld's DoD left troops to fight a prolonged insurgency without enough armored vehicles of any sort. Secondly, until last year the Pentagon virtually ignored the proven MRAP technology and preferred to make do with patching armor onto glorified jeeps.
The military had tested MRAP technology already in 2000, and purchased nearly two dozen of the vehicles. MRAPs should have been widely available as soon as IEDs became a major threat in Iraq, by the fall of 2003. Commanders in Iraq began requesting more MRAPs as early as December 2003, and mid-level officers and analysts continued the pressure during subsequent years. In February 2005 Marines in Anbar province urgently requested 1,169 MRAPs. Yet the upper ranks of the Pentagon were indifferent or oblivious, and none were ordered.
The first major contract to purchase MRAPs wasn't signed until May 2006 – for no more than 185 of the vehicles. By that stage at least 874 soldiers and marines had been killed in Iraq by means of IEDs.
As Iraq exploded in violence, in September 2006 the Pentagon decided to order another 600 MRAPs – but just for Iraqi rather than American soldiers.
Almost incredibly, it was only in May 2007 that Robert Gates made the purchase of MRAPs a priority for US forces in Iraq. That was after the Marines decided they now needed 3,700 of the vehicles; it was after news had trickled out about the February 2005 request that had been ignored; and it was after congressional calls arose for an investigation into the Pentagon's failure to act. Here is a May 2007 letter from Joe Biden to Gates:
How is it possible that with our nation at war, with more than 130,000 Americans in danger, with roadside bombs destroying a growing number of lives and limbs, we were so slow to act to protect our troops? I hope you will make clear your personal interest in getting answers and provide them to Congress.
As far as I know, DoD has never troubled itself to explain the prolonged failure to protect the troops by giving them the best mine-resistant vehicles. The main reason for both the Pentagon's failure, and its silence, is pretty clear however: The White House refuses to permit any bits of reality to intrude upon its own propaganda. That's something the top brass were willing to play along with.
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."
Gen. George Casey, the top commander in Iraq from June 2004 until February this year, repeatedly said that troop levels in Iraq would be cut just as soon as Iraqi troops took more responsibility for security. In March 2005, he predicted "very substantial reductions" in U.S. troops by early 2006. He said virtually the same thing a year later.
Casey wasn't the only optimist. In May 2005, Vice President Cheney declared that the insurgency was "in its last throes."
Given the view that the war would end soon, the Pentagon had little use for expensive new vehicles such as the MRAP, at least not in large quantities.
The Pentagon knew it needed a solution for the IED crisis, and was willing to shower billions of dollars on a boondoggle program, JIEDDO, though it achieved little. But the Joint Chiefs damned well weren't going to go to the Bush administration with the information that a fleet of armored vehicles was needed in Iraq to meet a crisis that Cheney & Co. preferred to treat as mythical.
All the foregoing information was fully available months ago. So how much of this essential context made it into the stories produced by the reporters who went along for Gates' dog & pony show on Friday?
Not very much, as a matter of fact. Here, culled from all the published reports, is a single sentence of context:
Amid criticism that he was slow in sending equipment aimed at improving the security of US troops in Iraq, Gates made MRAPs a priority in 2007 after learning that no marine has ever died inside such vehicles.
That's it. I suspect that a reader who blinked might have missed the lone context-sentence provided by our corporate media. Otherwise, from them it was almost all happy talk about the "something that really went right".
I guess the central lesson of the last six years is that when the Defense Secretary declares any of the Pentagon's manifest fiascos a "success", there's really nothing left for reporters to do but transcribe, type, and submit.