No enought $$$$ or major ck-up or bo-chap 
Placing their people in dangerous positions without basic proper
equipment after so many months 
No wonder , thay are having "some " command & control
problems
Along With Prayers, Families Send
Armor
By NEELA BANERJEE and JOHN KIFNER
When the 1544th Transportation Company of the Illinois National
Guard was preparing to leave for Iraq in February, relatives of the soldiers offered to
pay to weld steel plates on the unit's trucks to protect against
roadside bombs. The Army told them not to, because it would provide
better protection in Iraq, relatives said.
Seven months later, many of the company's trucks still have no
armor, soldiers and relatives said, despite running some of the
most dangerous missions in Iraq and incurring the highest rate of
injuries and deaths among the Illinois units deployed
there"This problem is very extensive," said Paul Rieckhoff, a
former infantry platoon leader with the Florida National Guard in
Iraq who now runs an organization called Operation Truth, an
advocacy group for soldiers and veterans.
Though soldiers of all types have complained about equipment in
Iraq, part-timers in the National Guard and Reserve say that they
have a particular disadvantage because they start off with outdated
or insufficient gear. They have been deployed with faulty radios,
unreliable trucks and, most alarmingly for many, a shortage of
soundly armored vehicles in a land regularly convulsed by roadside
attacks, according to soldiers, relatives and outside military
experts.
After many complaints when the violence in Iraq accelerated late
last year, the military acknowledged there had been shortages, in
part because of the rapid deployments. But the Army contends that
it has moved quickly to get better equipment to Iraq over the last
year.
"War is a come-as-you-are party," said Lt. Gen. C. V. Christianson,
the Army's deputy chief of staff for logistics, in an interview
yesterday. "The way a unit was resourced when someone rang the bell
is the way it showed up.
"As we saw this become a more enduring commitment, those in the
next rotation had full protective gear, like the newest body
armor," he said. General Christianson acknowledged, however, that
more work needed to be done to protect vehicles in particular and
that broader changes were needed so that the Army and Reserve would
be better prepared in the future.
Not all National Guard units are complaining about their equipment.
The soldiers in Company C of the Arkansas Army National Guard's
First Battalion, 153rd Infantry Regiment, have operated in one of
the riskiest parts of Baghdad since they arrived in April.
Capt. Thomas J. Foley, 29, the company commander, and his soldiers
bragged in recent interviews that their equipment, from Bradley
fighting vehicles to armored personnel carriers, was on par or
better than what many regular Army units in Iraq now have.
The improvements are of little solace to many soldiers' families.
Progress has been made, but it has been slow and inconsistent,
soldiers, families and other military observers said. When 18
reservists in Iraq refused an order to deliver fuel on Oct. 13,
they cited the poor condition of their trucks and the lack of armed
escorts in a particularly dangerous area.
Families Buy Equipment
Before the 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard
left in late February, some relatives bought those soldiers new
body armor to supplant the Vietnam-era flak jackets that had been
issued. The mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker, a member of the regiment
who was killed in April, bought a global positioning device after
being told that the Army said his truck should have one but would
not supply it.
And before Karma Kumlin's husband left with his Minnesota National
Guard unit in February, the soldiers spent about $200 each on
radios that they say have turned out to be more reliable - although
less secure - than the Army's. Only recently, Ms. Kumlin said, has
her husband gotten a metal shield for the gunner's turret he
regularly mans, after months of asking."This just points to an
extreme lack of planning ," said Ms. Kumlin, who is 31 and a
student. "My husband is part of the second wave that went to
Iraq."
Critics who say that disparities and shortages persist fault the
Pentagon for incorrectly assuming that American troops would return
home quickly after the war. As a result, they say, little was done
to equip and train the thousands of National Guard and Reserve
soldiers who were called to serve in Iraq and who now make up 40
percent of American troops there.
"I am really surprised that planners relied on the best-case
military scenario," said Jonathon Turley, a military historian at
George Washington University Law School who wrote last year about
shortages of body armor. He was then deluged with e-mail messages
from soldiers complaining of such shortages, 90 percent of them
from the National Guard and Reserve.
Military officials strongly dispute assertions that reservists and
National Guard troops have training and equipment inferior to that
of the regular Army. "The resourcing and equipping of the National
Guard today is indistinguishable from that of active duty
soldiers," said Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum. "In no time in history have
soldiers gone to battle as well equipped as they have gone into
Iraq."
Structured like the regular Army, the National Guard functions as a
state militia, typically called out for natural disasters or civil
disorder. The Reserve, in contrast, is largely composed of support
elements like civil affairs, the military police and supply. Both
groups train one weekend a month and two weeks in the summer. The
rest of the military does not consider them as well trained, well
equipped or well led as the standing Army, and many of these
part-time soldiers are also older.
Reliance on Reserves
Under a reorganization of the military after the Vietnam War,
support functions were passed from the Army to the Reserve.
Historians say the idea was to protect the Army from being sent
into another unpopular war because widespread support would be
needed to call up the reserves.
In his biography of Gen. Creighton Abrams, "Thunderbolt" (Simon
& Schuster, 1992), Lewis Sorley wrote than General Abrams built
into the restructuring "a reliance on reserves such that the force
could not function without them, and hence could not be deployed
without calling them up."
The reliance on the Reserve and National Guard also increased with
the shrinking of the active military from roughly 2.1 million at
the end of the Persian Gulf war to some 1.4 million today.
But for years, under what is called the Tiered Resourcing System,
new equipment went to those most likely to need it - the active
Army - while the Reserve and the Guard got the hand-me-downs.
"In addition to personnel shortfalls, most Army Guard units are not
provided all the equipment they need for their wartime
requirements," said Janet A. St. Laurent of the General Accounting
Office in testimony before Congress in April. Ms. St. Laurent noted
that many Guard units had radios so old that they could not
communicate with newer ones, and trucks so old that the Army lacked
spare parts for them.
Army officials concede that the old approach to training and
equipping the Guard and Reserve did not prepare them for the new
realities of Iraq. Progress appears to have been made in providing
modern body armor and some other equipment, families and soldiers
say.
The Army says it is on schedule to armor all its Humvees in Iraq by
April 2005, despite the fact that only one factory in the United
States puts armor on the vehicles. Moreover, the Guard is
developing a plan to heighten the training and preparedness of its
soldiers, under which a given unit could expect to be deployed
every six years.
But the glaring problem for soldiers and families remains the
vulnerability of trucks. In a conventional war there would be a
fixed front line and no need for supply trucks to be armored. But
in Iraq, there are no clear front lines, and slow-moving truck
convoys are prime targets for roadside attacks.
Gen. James E. Chambers, the commander of the 13th Corps Support
Command, to which the recalcitrant soldiers who refused the
assignment are attached, told a news conference in Baghdad: "In Jim
Chambers' s opinion, the most dangerous job in Iraq is driving a
truck. It's not if, but when, they will be attacked."
Of the Illinois National Guard units now in Iraq, none of the 11
units has suffered as many casualties as the 1544th Transportation
Company. Of the approximately 170 men and women in the unit, 5 have
been killed and 32 wounded since the unit arrived in Iraq in March
and began delivering supplies and mail and providing armed escort
to civilian convoys.
Three of the soldiers died during mortar attacks on their base
south of Baghdad. The other two were killed when roadside bombs
exploded next to their unarmored trucks. Soldiers' relatives said
that they expected the Army to outfit the trucks better than they
themselves could have, after being told by the military that the
steel plates proposed by the families would shatter if hit.
But in fact, most of the trucks in the unit have nothing more than
the steel plates that the families offered to have installed in the
first place, said Lt. Col. Alicia Tate-Nadeau, a spokeswoman for
the Illinois Guard.
3 Meanings of Armored
The Army considers the 1544th's vehicles armored, a word that has a
broad and loose meaning in the Iraq conflict. There are three
categories of armored vehicles, Colonel Tate-Nadeau said. The
"up-armored" ones come that way from the factory and provide the
best protection for soldiers. Then come vehicles outfitted with
"armor kits," or prefabricated pieces, on the chassis. The last
option consists of "whatever the soldiers try to do themselves,
from large sheets of metal on their trucks to sandbags on the floor
of the cab," Colonel Tate-Nadeau said.
["If we're one of the richest nations in the world, our
soldiers shouldn't be sent out looking like the Beverly
Hillbillies," said the mother of one soldier []in the
unit, who, like many parents, asked not to be identified for fear
of repercussions for their children.
According to figures compiled by the House Armed Services Committee
and previously reported in The Seattle Times, there are plans to
produce armor kits for at least 2,806 medium-weight trucks, but as
of Sept. 17, only 385 of the kits had been produced and sent to
Iraq. Armor kits were also planned for at least 1,600 heavyweight
trucks, but as of mid-September just 446 of these kits were in
Iraq. The Army is also looking into developing ways to armor truck
cabs quickly, and has ordered 700 armored Humvees with special
weapons platforms to protect convoys.
Specialist Benjamin Isenberg, 27, of the Oregon National Guard,
died on Sept. 13 when he drove his unarmored Humvee over a homemade
bomb, the principal weapon of the insurgents, said his grandmother,
Beverly Isenberg of McArthur, Calif. The incident occurred near
Taji, the town north of Baghdad where the 18 reservists refused to
make a second trip with fuel that they say had been rejected as
contaminated.
"One of the soldiers in his unit said they go by the same routes
and at the same times every day," said Mrs. Isenberg, whose husband
is a retired Army officer and who has two sons in the military and
another grandson in the Special Forces who was wounded in Iraq.
"They were just sitting ducks in an unarmored Humvee."
Carolyn Marshall contributed reporting for this article
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