Procurement Process Slows Deployment of Improved Vehicles

JIM LEHRER:

And to the third and last of our reports about military equipment priorities. Economics correspondent Paul Solman looks at questions about a vehicle designed to protect soldiers and Marines.

FRANZ GAYL, Science Adviser, U.S. Marine Corps:

Before I start reading this, I just want to make clear that the views I express do not represent the views of the United States Marine Corps or the Department of Defense.

PAUL SOLMAN, NewsHour Economics Correspondent:

Retired Marine Corps major, current Pentagon science advisor, reluctant whistleblower Franz Gayl.

FRANZ GAYL:

This culture has been criminally negligent in a way that has led directly to the unnecessary loss of hundreds of American and innocent Iraqi lives and countless serious injuries.

PAUL SOLMAN:

Gayl wrote those words in May, trying to make the case that the Marine procurement system was responding too slowly to urgent equipment requests from the front. He'd recently been on a five-month fact-finding trip to Iraq, had prepared a detailed presentation, but…

FRANZ GAYL:

I was told by my superiors that I would not be allowed to give that presentation after all. And that was a sign that the corporate Marine Corps was reluctant to candidly discuss these issues, however difficult they are to solve, outside of its own family environment.

PAUL SOLMAN:

So Gayl went public. And what specifically is his beef? That the Marine bureaucracy ignored — in some cases for years — urgent equipment requests from Iraq for, among other items: an automatic language translator; an unmanned aerial drone; a laser device to warn off on-coming drivers at checkpoints, thereby preventing innocent people from entering a shoot-to-kill zone; and, most important, the MRAP, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protection vehicle, whose v-shaped hull disperses the impact of an IED or a landmine from below, the leading cause of American deaths in Iraq.

The first urgent request for MRAPs was sent in February 2005. Since then, at least 1,200 Americans have been killed by IEDs, and even the military agrees that MRAPs could have saved most of them.

FRANZ GAYL:

The bottom line is, after many casualties and many, many deaths, unfortunately, in a couple of years, now it has become a moral imperative for the MRAP to be developed.

PAUL SOLMAN:

Today, after escalating reprisals against Gayl by the Marines, including a rewritten job description and formal reprimand, and a flood of publicity about slow delivery of MRAPs, thousands are finally being rushed to the front, a full two-and-a-half years after the first urgent needs request was officially filed. And the reason for the delay, says Gayl, is the snail's pace of the military bureaucracy, apparent when he himself went to Iraq last year.

FRANZ GAYL:

I realized that the people around me had a completely different sense of urgency than the people that I was dealing with back here. I was able to see that the warfighter was being hurt directly by decisions being made within the bureaucracy back in the rear.