Senators Kennedy & Bayh seek $213 million more for humvee armor

http://tedkennedy.com/journal/55/more-funds-to-protect-troops-in-iraq

More Funds to Protect Troops in Iraq

Senator Kennedy is working with Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana to get an additional $213 million added to the Iraq supplemental spending bill to better protect troops in Iraq. The money would speeden the pace of armoring the troops’ humvees, a procees that has been lagging throughout the war. You can read more about the spending bill here:

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/nation/11448341.htm

Senator Kennedy on our troops not having the armor they need: “No soldier should be sent into battle unprotected, but that is exactly what happened in Iraq, it’s a tragedy that our soldiers are still paying the price for this delay,”

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Posted on Thu, Apr. 21, 2005

Two senators seek $213 million more for humvee armor

By Joseph Tanfani
Inquirer Staff Writer

Two U.S. senators are pushing for hundreds of millions in additional funds for armored humvees, saying the Army is still far from solving the armor shortage for troops in Iraq. "No soldier should be sent into battle unprotected, but that is exactly what happened in Iraq," Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D., Mass.) said on the Senate floor yesterday, citing an Inquirer article and a government study on delays in supplying armored trucks and humvees to soldiers. "It's a tragedy that our soldiers are still paying the price for this delay," Kennedy said. He and Sen. Evan Bayh (D., Ind.), early and dogged critics of the pace of armoring military vehicles in Iraq, are sponsoring an amendment to add $213 million for armored humvees to an $81 billion supplemental spending bill for the Iraq war.

A vote on the amendment was set for today. An aide to the Republican-controlled Armed Services Committee said there was bipartisan support for some added armor funding. Though Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said all vehicles leaving bases in Iraq have some kind of armor, a third, or 11,700, have nothing more than cut sheets of steel, inadequate by Army standards, The Inquirer reported April 10. The Army is working to put better armor on those vehicles but has said the job won't be finished until late this year. While supplying more armor, faster, might have saved lives, the Army's efforts were hamstrung by a piecemeal, stop-and-start approach to production, The Inquirer reported.

Kennedy also cited a study issued this month by the Government Accountability Office, Congress' investigative arm, which found that bureaucratic delays had repeatedly slowed the armor production effort. Even the Army's own depots, where much vehicle armor work has been done, were not always working at full capacity, the study found. An Army spokesman said in a statement yesterday, "The Army continues to aggressively work with industry to provide our soldiers the best armor protection available." The additional $213 million would keep an armored-humvee production line running at full capacity until the end of the federal fiscal year in July, according to a Kennedy aide.

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Contact staff writer Joseph Tanfani at 215-854-2684 or jtanfani@phillynews.com. Staff writer Tom Infield contributed to this article.

IIRC, the company that makes it is located here in Indiana.

Please correct if inaccurate.

like they did the increas to veterans benefits? funny how we're the ones painted as being anti-military all the time :grr: