Rumsfeld, armor, and reactions: Part 2 (production and capability in general)

Overview

This post will begin to examine the production and capability issue. As I said in Part 1, when I first read Rumskull's comments about production and capability, they seemed reasonable to me. Capacity in manufacturing cannot be increased instantaneously. It does take some time. As a result, production likely will lag behind demand for some period. Still, upon further reflection, I had many questions. What was the demand--as defined by the military--for armored vehicles when the war started? When was the need for more armored vehicles discovered? Why was it not discovered sooner? What had to be done to increase the production capacity? When did that start? What type of production are we talking about--up-armored Humvees, other armored vehicles, armor to be installed in theater, etc.? And more...

A few basic facts

• Initial number of up-armored Humvees, lack of armored vehicles in general, and the increase in demand

As reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, prior to the war, the Defense Department had requested 235 up-armored Humvees for use in Iraq. And according to Stars and Stripes and Newsday, at the end of major combat operations on May 1, 2003, there were indeed only 235 up-armored Humvees in Iraq.

However, according to Army Maj. Gary Tallman, a Pentagon spokesman, "By August (2003), CENTCOM wanted 1,233 of the Humvees in Iraq, and by September that request had shot up to 3,000." In March of this year, Greg Jaffe wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal which stated that the demand for armored humvees at that time was 4500 and climbing. I found excerpts of the WSJ article here and here. The second link is for a post entitled "Army's Cold War thinking impeded production of armored HMMWV" by Phillip Carter at Intel Dump. Carter's post includes the following:

If you look at the Army's vehicle fleet generally, you will see that very few vehicles have any sort of armor or crew protection at all. The vast majority of Army HMMWVs (humvees) and cargo trucks were designed to move in a permissive "rear area" environment, and thus they have nothing but fibreglass and canvas to protect their occupants. Similarly, if you look at the Modified Table of Organization and Equipment for most "rear area" units -- from maintenance companies to medical companies to signal companies -- you will see a noticeable lack of combat equipment. These support units lack crew-served weapons, night-vision goggles, GPS systems, and tactical radios. Simply put, they don't have the equipment necessary to protect themselves while they do their support mission.

(emphasis added). The point I want to emphasize here is that we are not just talking about Humvees, which answers one of the questions I posed above. Almost all of the media coverage and DoD response has dealt with only humvees.

• Initial reaction--ship up-armormed Humvees from other areas to Iraq

While there were only 235 up-armored Humvees in Iraq at the start of the war, efforts to get more of the vehicles to Iraq started in July 2003 when, according to Stars and Stripes, the U.S. European Command began shifting 600 up-armored Humvees to Iraq. Most of those vehicles came from the Balkans.

The movement of armored Humvees out of the Balkans has been an easy transition, according to officials there.

“The Army is looking at administration and staff sections [in Bosnia and Herzegovina] that really don’t have a need for these [armored] Humvees,” said Army Capt. Chuck Traxler, a spokesman for U.S. troops in Bosnia.

“The environment in Bosnia is fairly stable compared to other areas,” he said, and noted that the public affairs office has three armored Humvees that have not been used in 18 months. Those vehicles are earmarked for Iraq.

There are two matters related to this portion of the Stars and Stripes article I want to highlight now. First, remember that the shift of up-armored Humvees began in July 2003. I will explain the importance of that fact in a subsequent post. Second, recall that in the first post on this topic, I noted that on December 8, 2004, Rumskull said "The other day...I looked outside the Pentagon and there were six or eight up-armored humvees. They'’re not there anymore. They'’re en route out here, I can assure you," and then I wrote

That's great, Don, but why were they at the Pentagon in the first place instead of in a war zone where our troops are getting killed? And why did it take until November 2004 for you to get them en route to Iraq?

Let me see if I understand...Bosnia--a former war zone and an area that is still subject to violence--is a more stable environment than the Pentagon. Am I missing something here?

• Production rates

The company which produces the up-armored Humvees, O’'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt (which is owned by Armor Holdings), originally produced 30 a month, and by November 2003, there were plans to up production to 80 per month, and then increase to 220 per month by spring 2004 (these figures came from the Stars and Stripes article). On the one hand, the amount of time needed to increase production this much is understandable. As Maj. Tallman said in June 2004, "When you go from 235 to all units, that is a very large increase to say the least. It took a while to ramp up." In other words, generally speaking, no major manufacturing plant can double (much less increase by 700%) its production capacity overnight. On the other hand, it seems that production could have been increased at a faster rate. As the Indianapolis Star reported on May 7, 2004,

[T]op Army officials insisted they were ordering as many of the trucks as could be made in Indiana and armored in Ohio.

They turned out to be wrong. Last fall, Army officials insisted that 80 armored Humvees could be produced a month, then raised that estimate to 220. In reality, AM General Corp. of South Bend and Armor Holdings of Fairfield, Ohio, are capable of turning out hundreds more a month, according to company officials.

*******

Robert Mecredy, a president of Armor Holdings, which owns O'Gara-Hess, said he "started going ballistic" last fall when he realized O'Gara-Hess was considered the bottleneck. "I put on a full-court press to address the notion that Armor Holdings was incapable of meeting the requirements."

*******

(Brian) Hart (whose son was killed in an unarmored humvee) said he phoned O'Gara-Hess officials and learned the armorer could expand production. In December, Hart alerted several politicians' staff members. The information reached Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., an Armed Services Committee member.

Reed toured the Ohio plant and confirmed Hart's information. "For the longest time they were willing to produce many more vehicles than the Army was ordering," Reed said.

Pressed by Bayh, Kennedy, Reed and others, Brownlee toured AM General and O'Gara-Hess in February. Orders for the armored vehicles soon escalated to 300 a month. The Ohio plant is ramping up for that now.

Bayh said he thinks the Army stuck to its order for 220 Humvees a month to try to keep the cost of the war down.

"People in the Pentagon were aware these vehicles could be produced in larger numbers."

I really hope that Senator Bayh's view on keeping costs down is wrong. By September 2004, the production rate had increased to 450 per month. And then the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that two days after Rumskull's original comments, Armor Holdings spokesman Michael Fox said that O’Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt "could do more than 450 and if asked to do more we will do more." As Newsweek put it,

The Humvee armoring company had told reporters only a few days before that it was operating at 22 percent under capacity, but that there were no more orders from the Pentagon...(The Pentagon claims it did not know about the additional capacity until the head of O'Gara's holding company, Armor Holdings of Jacksonville, Fla., announced last week that it was possible.

This makes the second time that the Pentagon was apparently unaware that O'’Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt was capable of increasing production. In any event, the Pentagon has increased its demand to 550 per month, and O’'Gara-Hess & Eisenhardt expects to reach that level by March 2005.

• Add-on armor

Here I will not address "hillbilly armor," which refers to soldiers finding whatever they can find in theater to add to their vehicles. In this post I will instead address the production of armor kits specifically designed to be fitted on vehicles in theater.

The WSJ article stated that as of March 19, 2004, the Army was "scrambling to produce about 8,400 add-on armor kits that can be bolted to existing Humvees with sheet-metal or fiberglass skin and canvas doors."

And great emphasis was being placed on such add-on kits as of December 2004. A December 11, 2004, New York Times article ("Pentagon Asks Contractor to Speed Production of Armored Humvees") said

As late as yesterday morning, Army officials in charge of providing equipment to soldiers said that what was needed were not more new armored Humvees, but rather more of the conversion kits being produced that add armor to existing Humvees. They said that the kits could be removed, allowing the Army to convert the Humvees back into lighter vehicles when they were no longer needed in life-threatening situations like the attacks soldiers are facing in Iraq.

The Philadelphia Inquirer article referenced above added that "All humvees used by U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will be equipped with armor plating by March, and trucks and other heavy equipment there will receive similar upgrades by summer, the Pentagon said yesterday."

• Where are we now?
  

Here are two summaries of the numbers, from the Philadelphia Inquirer (Dec. 11, 2004) and Newsweek (Dec. 20, 2004), respectively:

The U.S. military has about 19,000 humvees in its Central Command area, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan. Tesia Williams, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Army Materiel Command, said 15,000 of them had some degree of armor protection. The remaining 4,000 will be armored in the coming months, she said yesterday.

About 1,900 of the 5,900 trucks, trailers and other heavy vehicles also have had the upgrade, Williams said. The rest are scheduled to be completed by the summer.

*******

Of the 19,782 Humvees currently in the Iraq theater, according to the Army's latest numbers, only a little more than a quarter, or 5,910, are the new M-1114 model, which is armored top to bottom and can withstand the weight because it has an improved transmission, a 6.5-liter turbo diesel engine and a tougher chassis. An additional 4,737 Humvees have no armor, and most of the rest have been modified with add-on kits.

Wrap-up and preview of my add-ons

In some ways, the information above does not show any screw-ups by Rumskull or the Defense Department or the Army. One could conclude that the powers that be saw a need for adjustments and took actions as quickly as reasonably possible. Here's an example of a similar conclusion from Newsweek:

Gary Motsek, director of support operations for Army Materiel Command...says the Army has adjusted faster than many people realize. Last fall, he notes, when the Army realized the gravity of the insurgency, engineers at the Army Research Lab at Aberdeen, Md., designed the add-on armor kits for the Humvees "over a weekend."

(emphasis added). I--and here's a big surprise--do not make the conclusion that the powers that be acted in such a timely manner. That is in part due to additional information related to the emphasized portion of the preceding quote. See, the conclusion that the powers that be acted in a timely and reasonable manner depends on "when the Army realized the gravity of the insurgency" and similar issues. That will be addressed in Part 3.