yet another reason to build all our weapons systems at home.
Faulty Armor?
By John Barry, Newsweek Web Exclusive
http://www.msnbc.com/news/962548.asp?0cv=CB10
The Bush administration's military predicament in Iraq has suddenly gotten worse.
JUST A MONTH before the next U.S. Army unit is due to deploy in Iraq to relieve the hard-pressed forces already there, the military is confessing to a potential showstopper. The deploying unit's new armored vehicles may have faulty armor which would leave them vulnerable to machine-gun fire and to the rocket-propelled grenades that are the Iraq insurgents' favorite weapon.
The vehicle is the prized new Stryker wheeled troop carrier, advertised as the first fruit of the Army's plan to transform itself into a lighter, go-anywhere-fast force.
Worse still: the Army has known it might have a problem since February, but has kept quiet about it. An Army memo sent yesterday to the head of the Stryker program, and obtained by NEWSWEEK, reports: "Evidently this issue was first raised in February 2003. Am unsure how this issue escaped public scrutiny for six months." Not even Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was told, NEWSWEEK has learned. "Understand that ARSTAF [Army Staff] have been told to treat this issue as if it were 'classified'," says the memo, which is addressed to Lt. Gen. John Riggs, the head of the Stryker program. At a recent Army meeting to discuss the faulty armor, the main topic on the agenda, according to a DOD source, was: "How do we tell Secretary Rumsfeld?" Rumsfeld is now in Iraq. According to the memo to Riggs, the Army briefed "selected staffers" on Capitol Hill yesterday.
Unlike the massively thick steel that tanks are made from, the 19-ton Stryker has a light steel and aluminum structure. But this is clad in 130 ceramic tiles, supposedly tough enough stop heavy machine-gun fire and deflect the blast of incoming RPGs. More than 600 Strykers have been built by General Dynamics, which has a $4 billion contract to produce 2,100 in all. But the ceramic armor tiles are produced for GD by a German subcontractor. The problem arose when the German firm apparently changed the mix of ingredients in the tiles. (The firm could not be reached for comment.)
The Army discovered this in February, sources say, when, as standard quality control, some tiles were X-rayed. Further tests revealed that, on some batches of tiles, the subcontractor had changed not only the ingredients but parts of the manufacturing process too. In August, a tile from one of those errant batches failed to stop machine-gun bullets in a live-fire test at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland, according to Army sources.
But which Stryker vehicles are carrying the defective tiles? The Army and GD have been combing databases on the Stryker construction program to track those tiles among the close to 80,000 delivered so far. The findings are bad news. "All Strykers in combat brigades and at test sites--more than 600 vehicles--are equipped with some [potentially faulty] armor panels" and will need retesting, says the memo to Riggs.
The Stryker unit that is to deploy to Iraq in October is the Third Brigade of the Second Infantry Division. The division, based at Fort Lewis in Washington, is one of the Army's two testbeds for the Stryker. The Third Brigade has 309 Strykers--their deployment to Iraq was to be the Stryker's combat debut. But the database has found that most of those Strykers may be carrying one or more faulty tiles. "My understanding is that 225 of the 309 Strykers in the brigade will need to be examined," says the memo to Riggs. "The number to be fixed will most likely be less than that but it is TBD [to be determined]."
Army experts at Aberdeen have been working frantically since early summer to test every batch of tiles, and figure out how to fix the faulty ones. The Army brass has demanded daily progress reports from Aberdeen. The only long-term fix, Aberdeen has concluded, is to replace all the faulty tiles. But that cannot be done in time for the Iraq deployment. So the emergency fix that the Army has decided for the Strykers bound for Iraq is to glue a sheet of ultrahard steel behind each faulty tile. But that could cause further problems. A memo to the Army from contractor GD, also obtained by NEWSWEEK, warns: "The steel reinforcement … increases the Stryker's weight."
Weight is already a controversial issue for the Stryker. The vehicle was designed to be air-mobile, which the Army defined to mean transportable by a C-130 aircraft. But the vehicle is already so heavy that a C-130 can in fact carry it only for a short distance. Extra steel plates will only compound this problem.
The Stryker program has been under critical fire since its inception five years ago. Many of the Army's most senior officers privately consider the Stryker far too large--it's as big as a school bus--and far too vulnerable either in open combat or in the confined spaces of urban warfare. (Even with its ceramic cladding, certain spots on the Stryker remain unprotected against an accurately aimed RPG or even rifle fire.) The project was the brainchild of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. With Shinseki's retirement a few weeks ago, there is speculation whether the new chief of staff, Gen. Pete Schoomaker, will re-examine the Stryker program. The revelations about faulty armor means Congress will almost certainly intervene. The memo to General Riggs warns: "The possibility of congressional hearings on this issue must be considered."
Army spokesman Maj. Gary Tallman said: "The Army discovered this through our testing process, and we have a plan in place to fix it. The vehicles will be certified [as fixed] before they deploy to Iraq."
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