Gross Incompetency: US Soldiers Still Have Inadequate Armor, Medical Supplies

" Nearly a year after Congress demanded action, the Pentagon has still failed to figure out a way to reimburse soldiers for body armor and equipment they purchased to better protect themselves while serving in Iraq," reports AP today, via AOL News.

Soldiers and their parents are still spending hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars for armor they say the military won't provide. One U.S. senator said Wednesday he will try again to force the Pentagon to obey the reimbursement law it opposed from the outset and has so far not implemented.

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., said he will offer amendments to the defense appropriations bill working its way through Congress, to take the funding issue out of the hands of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and give control to military unit commanders in the field. 'Rumsfeld is violating the law,' Dodd said in an interview with The Associated Press. 'It's been sitting on the books for over a year. They were opposed to it. It was insulting to them....'

Under the law passed by Congress last October, the Defense Department had until Feb. 25 to develop regulations for the reimbursement, which is limited to $1,100 per item. Pentagon officials opposed the reimbursement idea, calling it 'an unmanageable precedent that will saddle the DOD with an open-ended financial burden.'

In a letter to Dodd in late April, David Chu, undersecretary of defense for personnel, said his office was developing regulations to implement the reimbursement, and would be done in about 60 days.

Soldiers and their families have reported buying everything from higher-quality protective gear to armor for their Humvees, medical supplies and even global positioning devices...."
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Today in other Iraq War news, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces were improving daily, downplaying the fact that the number of Iraqi battalions able to fight without U.S. help had melted to ONE.
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Ok...here's the deal. Yes, all the normal peace activists, liberal-leaning Democrats and parents of soliders in harm's way want the Iraq War to end...now, not sometime in the distant future.

But everyone......absolutely everyone from all sides of the political aisle....must admit that the Bush Administration war effort, led by Donald Rumsfeld, is unquestionably and thoroughly incompetent.

There is no excuse, more than two years after the US invaded Iraq, that our own soldiers don't yet have adequate armor to protect themselves and their vehicles.

This despite the facts that the US has the highest "defense" budget in the history of the world....that the US now spends more than half of the entire world's "defense" expenditures each year.....that the Defense Department has its highest budget (and growing) in US history.

This gross incompetency is an immoral scandal, and is likely explainable only by massive Bush Administration corruption and rampant cronyism. And Congress is equally incompetent if it continues to allow this travesty to occur unchecked. (It occurs to me that this incompetence is so gross as to possibly constitute criminal negligence....)

Where is $350 billion of taxpayer money going, if not to protect US soldiers, to train Iraqi soldiers and to rebuild Iraq?
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Related article -- Iraq War & National Security Statistics, Sept 2005
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