Vehicles in Iraq need replacement parts
By Robert Burns
Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The Army overcame enormous logistics obstacles in the successful march to Baghdad last spring, but sustaining the force has become a problem, a senior Army general says.
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Gen. Paul Kern, chief of the Army Materiel Command, cited as an example the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which he said have sustained so much wear and tear in Iraq that the Army is months' short of replacements for the steel tracks on which they travel.
U.S. Army soldiers take cover behind a Bradley fighting vehicle while searching an Iraqi military compound. Bradleys and other military vehicles are seeing extensive use and are in need of replacement tracks.
Kern said the Army also is in short supply of replacement tracks for Abrams tanks, Paladin howitzers and other vehicles.
Similarly, the Army has had trouble supplying enough tires for Humvee utility vehicles and generators for electrical power, Kern said Friday in an interview with a group of reporters at the Pentagon.
Kern said these shortfalls are being addressed and have not created a major combat readiness problem. He said they reflect the difficulty of maintaining a high pace of operations in Iraq at the same time the Army remains active in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world.
"We haven't closed down Afghanistan, we've still got people operating in the Balkans, and I've got my eye on Korea," he said. "So we can't take all the resources of the U.S. Army and send them all to Iraq."
Asked whether U.S. officials had anticipated at the outset of the Iraq war that the postwar stabilization phase would last so long and require so many troops, Kern said, "Some did. Some didn't."
He acknowledged that the military underestimated what it would take to sustain the force in Iraq.
"It's a question of, 'Did you do enough?' The answer right now is, 'Probably not,' " he said. " 'Did you not plan for it?' We did. But again it's a question of how you spread all those resources."
Although fewer soldiers were deployed for the Iraq war than the 1991 Gulf War, getting them and their equipment in place for the attack was in some ways more difficult, Kern said. They all had to arrive through a single port in Kuwait and also be resupplied from Kuwait.
Kern said the Army is spending millions of dollars a day sustaining the force in Iraq. He said he did not have a more precise cost estimate.
Sgt. Maj. Michael Bush, the top enlisted soldier in the 1st Armored Division, speaking separately Friday in a video teleconference from Baghdad, said his Humvee put on more than 5,000 miles in three months in Baghdad.
"So I have to tell you that we're putting a lot more usage in the vehicles, I think, than we have in the past," he said. Bush said in the past few weeks the supply system has begun catching up with the demand for Humvee replacement tires.
Speaking in the same video teleconference, V Corps Command Sgt. Maj. Kenneth O. Preston said that over the past few months Army tanks in Iraq have been driven as much as they normally would in two or three years.
Kern said the demand for replacement track for tanks and other vehicles is so great that the Army has begun shipping it by air rather than the cheaper but slower way of sending it by sea.
"That's a pretty expensive way to move track, but that's what we're doing," he said. "It will take us, on our current schedule as we see it, about three months to catch up with the demand."
Bradleys, which are being used heavily to provide security for supply convoys in Iraq, are putting on as many as 1,200 miles a month, compared to their usual 800 miles per year, Kern said.
As a result, Bradley tracks are being replaced every two months, whereas in peacetime they last a full year, he said.
