Report: Pentagon Going Overboard on MRAPs

For years, the Pentagon ignored calls to put heavily-armored vehicles on the streets of Iraq. Now, according to a new report, there's a good chance the Defense Department is overreacting -- buying way, way too many of the vehicles than is militarily or financially responsible.

The Pentagon is on track to buy 15,000 or more of the Mine Resistant, Ambush Protected vehicles, or MRAPs -- at a cost of nearly a million dollars each. There's no question that the tough, bomb-deflecting vehicles are life-savers; soldiers are so secure inside the MRAPs, they sometimes don't even know when they've been hit with an improvised explosive. There's also no question that guerrilla types can and will build bigger bombs, to knock even these well-armored MRAPs out. So the vehicles are a short- to mid-term fix, as Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Conway acknowledged on Monday. According to the AP, "Conway said he sees the current procurement plans for the vehicles as a moral imperative, but that a longer-term assessment of military requirements is probably necessary."

"Can I give a satisfactory answer to what we're going to be doing with those things in five or 10 years? Probably not," he said at a lunch sponsored by the
Center for a New American Security. "Wrap them in shrink wrap and put them in asphalt somewhere is about the best thing that we can describe at this point. And as expensive as they are, that is probably not a good use of the taxpayers money."

The new report, from the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, raises similar fiscal concerns. But it also questions whether the MRAPs are at odds with the American counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Counterintuitively, it may also be that a better way to reduce overall
US casualties is to have personnel operate outside their vehicles.
Successful counterinsurgency (COIN) operations, in particular, require close contact with the local population to provide them with security and to develop a working knowledge of the local environment that, together, produces the intelligence necessary to defeat an insurgent enemy force. This approach is similar to law enforcement techniques that emphasize policemen “walking the beat” in a neighborhood as opposed to merely driving through it in a squad car. Simply put, commanders may have to risk some casualties in the near term, by having their troops dismount, in order to develop the secure environment that yields the intelligence that will reduce the insurgent threat—and US
casualties—over the longer term. Given this approach, which is consistent with the military’s new COIN doctrine, the MRAP—at least in this situation—may send the wrong message to troops in the field.*..

Counterinsurgent force commanders know that armor protects forces in the field; so, to mitigate the effects of enemy action and reduce casualties, commanders are drawn to increase the armor in their force.
But heavily armored forces in a COIN environment are made less effective in accomplishing the tasks necessary to prevail.

(High five: Nick)

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