It's an old, old story. A huge, powerful force is frustrated by a much smaller, but more nimble enemy.
... insurgents, exploiting gaps in patrols in the region, would periodically rush the base, fire a handful of mortars at the Marine hospital, then disappear. Almost every day for a year the insurgents repeated the deadly trick with seeming impunity.
But the story of the Marine hospital in Al Anbar doesn't echo the biblical story just on the battlefront. In David Axe's account for Wired, the Marines are also David, facing off with the giant of a Military bureaucracy more interested in seeing that the money flows into the right hands than seeing that equipment gets to the field. Numerous requests for drone aircraft that could help to protect the hospital disappeared into the system without response. Why? Because the military, in conjunction with a defense contractor, was developing a new drone, one that won't be ready for years. If they let the Marines have more of the old drone, they were worried it would cut into the hundreds of millions that had been targeted for the next generation solution -- one that critics consider worse than the drone it replaces.
While an adaptive enemy takes advantage of commercial equipment to build lethal roadside bombs and survivable communications networks, Quantico eschews cheap off-the-shelf products in favor of Cold War-era processes for designing expensive new weapons over the course of years. ... "To some degree, a culture of indifference existed where it was acceptable to delay or deny for months our servicemen and women's urgent needs," says Nick Schwellenbach, a defense expert with the Project on Government Oversight.
The processes in place are designed not to help the troops, but to help the military-industrial complex. Axe's account contains multiple examples of the direct and deadly effect this has for those actually fighting, including how holding back armored vehicles left 200 Marines to die (and an unknown number wounded) who could have been saved.
The protection of favored contractors and commitment to playing only with the big money defense industry costs not only the lives of Marines, but also Iraqis. When Marines were not given any non-deadly means of stopping drivers at checkpoints, they pooled their own money to buy "dazzlers" used to temporary blind drivers. When officials found out, they took the dazzlers away, giving Marines no choice but to fire on those who didn't stop. All those horror stories of families being shot when they didn't understand the signs at a checkpoint? They didn't have to happen.
While Republicans engage in spittle-launching bombast over funding that's suppose to "support" the troops in the field, in truth, those troops are often left defenseless not by lack of funding, but by policies that would rather see money in the pocket of contractors than equipment in the hands of Marines. The new funding bill doesn't equal support of the troops, it only means more bundles of cash for a defense industry growing fat off misery and death.
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