[IP] More strange statistics from the Department of Defense
Begin forwarded message:
From: Robert Lee <robertslee@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: July 5, 2005 11:37:54 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: More strange statistics from the Department of Defense
Reply-To: robertslee@xxxxxxxxxxx
For IP, if not too caustic.
http://today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?
type=politicsNews&storyID=2005-07-05T213209Z_01_N05155078_RTRIDST_0_POLI
TICS-SECURITY-USA-WARS-DC.XML
Military brass rethinking two war strategy. In supporting possible
need to rethink they state:
“A senior Army officer noted that many of the more than 1,700 U.S.
troops who lost their lives in Iraq died because the military had not
anticipated the need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on
armor to protect military vehicles against improvised explosive
devices.”
These are the armor kits that caused Rumsfeld to embarrass himself.
A reporter asked why the Humvees were not armored and Rumsfeld, who
never fought in a war, said, “We fight with the army we have, not
with the army we want.” He then went on to say that the government
was having them made as fast as they could but that there was a
bottleneck at production. Rumsfeld reported that in this great
nation we could source only 200 per month.
The very next day the manufacturers of the armor said there was no
bottleneck, the Department of Defense was simply refusing to buy them
as fast as they could be made. Which, of course, passed the smell
test. After all, the soldiers themselves, in their off hours, were
making several dozen of them each month out of scrap.
In the article below the general tries to say that armoring these
humvees costs “hundreds of millions of dollars”. Let’s examine this
just a tad. Let’s say that “hundreds of millions of dollars is more
than one hundred million and less than five hundred million. How
about three hundred million? Now if we had 300 hundred million
Humvees every armor set would cost $1. If we had 3 million each
would cost $100. If we had 1 million each one would cost $300. Do
we have 1 million humvees there? No. We do not have 1 million
people there. We have about 150,000 people there. So if everyone
has a humvee then the armor kits cost $2,000. But we do not have
150,000 humvees there. If we had 15,000 then each set would cost
$20,000. But we do not have 15,000 humvees there and $20,000 per set
of cold rolled seems a tad high already. Do we have 1,500? Then
each set costs $200,000 (more than the humvee).
All of which begs the question, did the army truly think that as in
Belgium at the end of WWII beautiful women would dance out of
doorways and stuff roses down the barrels of the guns? That is what
Rumsfeld said. Did he mean it?
Oh well, best not to go further and risk not being a patriot.
Robert Lee
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