Reply #24: Per your request:

[newswolf56]

A secret Pentagon study has found that at least 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to their upper body could have survived if they had extra body armor. That armor has been available since 2003 but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials.

http://securingamerica.com/ccn/node/3529

In all, with additional paperwork delays, the Defense Department took 167 days just to start getting the bulletproof vests to soldiers in Iraq once General Cody placed the order. But for thousands of soldiers, it took weeks and even months more, records show, at a time when the Iraqi insurgency was intensifying and American casualties were mounting.

By contrast, when the United States' allies in Iraq also realized they needed more bulletproof vests, they bypassed the Pentagon and ordered directly from a manufacturer in Michigan. They began getting armor in just 12 days.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2005/050307-armor-missteps.htm

Failure of this magnitude is not incompetence but policy: as in the aftermath of Katrina, as in the West Virginia mine disaster, as in the re-imposition of indentured via "bankruptcy reform," as in the blatant genocide of the Bush Medicare Prescription Drug Lord Benefit -- so also in Iraq: the atrocities not only deliberate but explained in every instance by the historical truth of class struggle.

As to "defense strategy and weapons systems" it happens that most of my intellectual and academic background is in history, including military history. Hence for example I recognize that the worsening treatment of U.S. soldiers is increasingly parallel to the brutal neglect of soldiers characteristic of the armies of the Czar (and not at all of the armies of der Kaiser or der Füehrer, both of whom saw to it that German soldiers -- including enlisted men -- received the best of everything: precisely the reason the Germans fought so well even after their defeat was a foregone conclusion). Nor is the calculated neglect of U.S. soldiers the only parallel to pre-Revolutionary Russia: with the final and permanent destruction of American liberty guaranteed by the appointment of Alito, so will inevitably follow the ever-more-savage enserfment of everyone who is not independently wealthy and therefore of the ruling class, and living conditions here will steadily deteriorate accordingly. The lot of U.S. soldiers -- especially when contrasted to soldiers of World War II or even the Vietnam era -- is merely a microcosm of that deterioration.

As to you your implicit questioning of my right to raise the issues, the mere fact that I am an American citizen gives me those rights and many more -- at least for now, until the Bush Regime publicly suspends the Constitution -- and shame on you for your elitist failure to recognize that fact.

Which reminds me: I did not post my military service to boast of it but merely to make it clear I (A)-know something of small arms and (B) did indeed serve. Did you?


Edit: text in italics added for completeness.