Army shuns system to combat RPGs
Tonight our troops are in harms way, contstantly dodging RPG rounds and IEDs while the Army is stonewalling on getting them the protection they need to avoid RPG attacks. That protection is a system called Trophy in development by Israel's Armament Development Authority.
Just how good is this system?
OFT (American Office of Force Transformation) officials subjected Trophy to 30 tests and found that it is "more than 98 percent" effective at killing RPGs.
98% effective, that's a high A in the academic community and way better than no protection at all. But of course that's not the end of the story, a second RPG troop protection system is being contracted through Raytheon. So the Raytheon system must be months or days drom deployment if the Army doesn't want to use the Israeli system right?
Col. Donald Kotchman, who heads the Army's program to develop an RPG defense, acknowledges that Raytheon's system won't be ready for fielding until 2011 at the earliest.
So why isn't our government deploying this system immediately? Well it turns out that the problem is not the effectiveness of the Trophy system, but the lifeblood of Washington (money) and good ol' boy politics getting in the way.
As a result, OFT decided to buy several Trophies -- which cost $300,000-$400,000 each -- for battlefield trials on Strykers in Iraq next year.
That plan immediately ran into a roadblock: Strong opposition from the U.S. Army. Why? Pentagon sources tell NBC News that the Army brass considers the Israeli system a threat to an Army program to develop an RPG defense system from scratch.
The $70 million contract for that program had been awarded to an Army favorite, Raytheon. Raytheon's contract constitutes a small but important part of the Army's massive modernization program called the Future Combat System (FCS), which has been under fire in Congress on account of ballooning costs and what critics say are unorthodox procurement practices.
No that's not a joke. The roadblock was due to the fact that a $70 million dollar contract had already been awarded to Raytheon. $70 million and we are spending 4 billion dollars a month in Iraq! Let's take the loss with the Raytheon money and deploy this system. A senion official says it best: this system will SAVE LIVES
In an e-mail, a senior official writes: "Trophy is a system that is ready -- today... We need to get this capability into the hands of our warfighters ASAP because: (1) It will save lives!"
If this final quote doesn't make you sick...I don't know what will. First our forces are sent to Iraq in a war based on faulty, cherry-picked intelligence and now their lives are being snuffed out daily to ensure Raytheon's profits stay up.
As one senior official (Pentagon) told NBC News, "This debate has nothing, zero, to do with capability or timeliness. It's about money and politics. You've got a gigantic program [FCS] and contractors with intertwined interests. Trophy was one of the most successful systems we've tested, and yet the Army has ensured that it won't be part of FCS and is now trying to prevent it from being included on the Strykers" that OFT planned to send to Iraq.
Video of Trophy in Action
See Another movie of Trophy: Warning Fox News!
If this is a political issue, we need to pressure our leaders to make it about saving lives instead of making money. Make sure your Reps. know their job is at stake if they continue to allow this stonewalling. I urge each and every one of you to write a strongly worded E-mail to your Representative and Senator in Congress(even if they are a Republican) to get this issue resolved.
* - All Emphasis (bold/underline) is mine.