Vehicles piling up, scavenged for parts at Army repair depots
By James Janega
Chicago Tribune, 09 October 2006
TEXARKANA, Texas -- The Army Humvees wait forlornly, lost in acres of damaged war machines with blown engines, missing hoods and scavenged parts. Grease-pencil scrawls turn windshields cracked in Iraq and Afghanistan into gripe lists. Soldiers' complaints about breakdowns are stuck on with duct tape.
All around are Humvees choked in Kuwaiti dust, trucks that succumbed to armor welded on by soldiers, and broken-down Bradley Fighting Vehicles from Iraq, their motorized ramps held up by industrial-strength bungee cords.
With the U.S. military critically overextended in manpower and funding, this crowded repair yard is yet another sign of the strain on the Pentagon--barely enough equipment to go around on the battlefield and not enough to train units back home. A backlog of hundreds of vehicles awaits repairs in one lot alone, a testament to extraordinary wear and tear on U.S. military equipment.
"Half of it is in Iraq or Afghanistan, the other half of it is in the shop. Whatever's not in Iraq or Afghanistan is in pretty bad shape," said Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Primarily, training is hampered by the backlog, but the margins for equipment availability have rarely been so narrow for the U.S. military. If the nation doesn't have another war, O'Hanlon observed, "I think we'll scrape by."
For a glimpse of the stress on equipment produced by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, look no further thanthe Red River Army Depot, a sprawling former cotton farm on the Texas border with Arkansas where contractors rush to rehab military vehicles as more arrive all the time.
As the cost of two wars pushes past $500 billion and the death toll for American troops reaches more than 3,000 in Iraq and Afghanistan, repair backlogs have meant equipment for anything other than fighting has been increasingly hard to repair in a timely manner.
In the partisan climate gripping Washington, the military depots have increasingly demanded attention in budgetary battles. Late last month, Congress gave the armed forces a supplemental appropriation that included an additional $23 billion to fix or replace damaged vehicles. About $18 billion of it will go to the Army.
Here, the problems are as simple--and as serious--as tearing vehicles apart and rebuilding them from the ground up, fast enough for units to train with them before shipping out again.
The five depots in the Army Materiel Command face a backlog of 24,000 pieces of gear worn out in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army says.
That includes radars and radios, Abrams tanks and the ubiquitous Humvee. Part of the pileup comes from 6,500 pieces of sand-pitted equipment that the Army has shipped home since January, almost twice what it sent back for overhauls the entire year before.
Another 7,000 pieces of damaged gear from Iraq were added to that number and await shipment home from Kuwait, as a cost-cutting program to overhaul and reuse damaged equipment gains momentum.
Extra armor straining vehicles
Officials say the latest appropriation will pay to fix what is broken now, but it will scarcely be enough to make headway with what overseas contractors and military contacts tell them is coming in the next 12 months.
"Our wheeled vehicle fleet is carrying armor on it that they were not designed to," said Brig. Gen. Robert Radin, deputy chief of staff for logistics and operations at Army Materiel Command. "Many of our wheeled systems are carrying hundreds, thousands of pounds more of payload than what they were initially designed to do."
That added weight strains engines, weakens suspensions and bends frames, he said. Dust makes abrasives of lubricants that grind vehicles from the inside out. Worse, every vehicle sent overseas is driven far beyond anything it has been asked to do before.
"You could argue that our fleet is aging five times faster. Our aircraft fleet is aging twice as fast [as before the wars]," Radin said.
The strain has meant ambitious production schedules--and ever-higher demands for funding--for the Humvee, Bradley and 5-ton truck lines at the Red River depot and for the M1 Abrams tank line at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama.
Much of the best working equipment is left in war zones as a pool for replacement troops, the military says.
But new or rebuilt equipment goes to those forces as well, forcing a pinch on training options for units at home as they prepare to redeploy.
"It doesn't change the way guys in Iraq are operating so much, but . . . units that deploy are the ones that are in the best shape. The problem is when you look under the carpet and you see the units that are not deployed," said Thomas Donnelly, senior adviser in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.
These units often lack trained soldiers and their full set of equipment, he said, and "it's only when you're in the last six months or so before you're shipped off to Iraq or Afghanistan that you come up to a decent level of capacity."
Driving that reality is the crushing strain placed on military equipment in the Middle East, where it is used hard, caked repeatedly in dust and jostled heavily, said David May, who heads the Humvee production lines at Red River.
"They are wore and tore, real bad," he said.
Borrowing tools and techniques from Detroit automakers, May's contractors rebuild a Humvee in Texarkana every 23 minutes for a total of 23 a day amid the clanging of hammers, squeal of power tools and clatter of torque wrenches.
Hundreds await fixing
Hundreds more wait in lots around the base--a piecemeal pool that mechanics can work on between larger orders from beleaguered units. Unavailable to Army units, the stockpile of broken vehicles amounts to a backlog as they wait for repair.
It is not for lack of effort.
Like racing pit crews, teams of workers in overalls pull apart the dusty Humvees. Worn-out or obsolete parts are heaved into refuse bins to be hauled away. Salvageable parts are tossed into smaller wire baskets to be power-washed and passed to production lines.
The armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles nearby are more complicated to rebuild.
It takes 35 work days to do it, said John Moore, chief of Red River's combat division; 125 Bradleys were rebuilt for the Army on his line last year and hundreds more were sent on to contractors in Pennsylvania. The fiscal year that began last week saw 112 Bradleys on Moore's books already, he said.
The effort to step up Bradley overhauls has been "real big," he said. "And we're probably going to be busier this year than we were last year. And we were busy last year."
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Citation: James Janega. "War takes big toll on Humvees," Chicago Tribune, 09 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0610090126oct09,1,5329066.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed
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