U.S. soldiers lack best protective gear : Jonathan Turley

U.S. soldiers lack best protective gear
Thu Dec 18, 6:41 AM ET

By Jonathan Turley http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=679&u=/usatoday/20031218/cm_usatoday/12074461&printer=1



The Pentagon (news - web sites) confirms that at least 40,000 of the 130,000 U.S. troops in Iraq don't have basic Kevlar Interceptor vests or the ceramic plates needed for full protection.


As a law professor, I am more comfortable researching legal briefs than body armor, but I was thrown into this controversy in early September when I received a call from Richard Murphy, one of my students during his first year of law school. I wasn't surprised to hear from Richard, but I was a bit surprised that he was calling from Iraq. His Army Reserve unit had been called up, so he had taken a leave from school to serve. What came as a greater surprise was that Richard's mother had mailed him body armor because his entire unit was issued Vietnam-era flak jackets that are designed to stop shrapnel rather than bullets. The Interceptor vest can stop AK-47 rounds moving 2,750 feet a second.



A Pentagon procurement officer then told me Interceptor vests were "non-priority" items, like tents. Accordingly, the military had decided to slowly phase out the old flak jackets in a one-for-one exchange program over 10 years. We invaded Iraq in the fifth year.


After I wrote about this shortage in a September Los Angeles Times column, I received dozens of e-mails and calls from troops in Iraq giving their own accounts. Some wrote that they had taped plates on the backs of their flak jackets to try to get some protection. Other units, they wrote, shifted the available vests from soldier to soldier.


This "swap and share" approach has forced soldiers in American and British units to play a dangerous version of Russian roulette. The first British death in the war occurred after Sgt. Steve Roberts was forced to give up his plates and was then shot in the chest while on patrol, according to The London Daily Telegraph.