Study: Delayed delivery of trucks led to Marine deaths

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Hundreds of U.S. Marines have been killed or injured by roadside bombs in Iraq because Marine Corps bureaucrats refused an urgent request in 2005 from battlefield commanders for blast-resistant vehicles, an internal military study concludes.

The study's author, Franz J. Gayl, catalogs what he says were flawed decisions and missteps by midlevel managers in Marine Corps offices that occurred well before Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld in December 2006.

Among the findings in the January 22 study:

• Budget and procurement managers failed to recognize the damage being done by IEDs in late 2004 and early 2005 and were convinced the best solution was adding more armor to the less-sturdy Humvees the Marines were using. Humvees, even those with extra layers of steel, proved incapable of blunting the increasingly powerful explosives planted by insurgents.

• An urgent February 2005 request for MRAPs got lost in bureaucracy. It was signed by then-Brig. Gen. Dennis Hejlik, who asked for 1,169 of the vehicles. The Marines could not continue to take "serious and grave casualties" caused by IEDs when a solution was commercially available, wrote Hejlik, who was a commander in western Iraq from June 2004 to February 2005.

Last year, the service defended the decision to not buy MRAPs after receiving the 2005 request. There were too few companies able to make the vehicles, and armored Humvees were adequate, officials said then. - CNN

Didn't somebody in charge of this mess once say something like "If the generals over there tell me what they need, they'll get it"?

I wonder if any other countries have these, and, if so, how they got them.

Please, no one tell me how these things take time. Sec. of Defense Gates declared the MRAP the Pentagon's acquisition priority in May 2007. At that time, the US military had 120 of these vehicles. In less than a year, more than 2,150 are in the hands of personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gen. Hejlik's request came in February 2005