G.I.S’ PAYCHECKS FUND TRUCK ARMOR

So the Pentagon lead­er­ship has finally rec­og­nized that they need to armor up their trucks. But they’ve set­tled on a damn pecu­liar way of pay­ing for the work. They’re dip­ping into sol­diers’ pay­checks to do it.
Let me explain. For this fis­cal year, 2005, Rummy & Co. asked for $25.7 mil­lion to secure its fleet of trucks. And Congress granted the request, when it passed the Pentagon’s bud­get in July.
But by November 19th, the Pentagon brass real­ized they had screwed up, Defense Department doc­u­ments show. There was no way $25.7 mil­lion could pay for armor­ing the M915 trucks, Medium Tactical Vehicles, and other vehi­cles haul­ing sup­plies through Iraq; to do the job right, more like $580 mil­lion would be needed. The chiefs had under bud­geted, more than twenty-fold.
The prob­lem was, the Defense Department’s bud­get for the year was already passed. And it was too early, yet, for a sec­ond, “sup­ple­men­tal” fund­ing bill. So, instead, the Pentagon’s eye­shades decided to “repro­gram” money, from one mil­i­tary project into another.
Now, the accoun­tants could have taken money from hulk­ing, multi-billion dol­lar items, like the F-22 fighter or the creaky mis­sile defense pro­gram. But no. Instead, the cash along with about a bil­lion dol­lars in other funds — was taken from the Army’s pay­roll. From the accounts to pay sol­diers in the field.
With that money gone, there’s now only enough cash left in the reg­is­ter to keep pay­ing sol­diers until May or so. If a “sup­ple­men­tal” bud­get bill rumored to be $75 bil­lion or more — isn’t passed by then, there will be no pay­checks for G.I.s.
Congress will never let that hap­pen, of course. No politi­cian in his right mind is going to keep sol­diers from get­ting paid. So, in the end, G.I.s will get the money they’ve been promised.
But, still, wouldn’t it have been bet­ter to get this armor money together in the first place? The war has been going on since last March. Planning for it started in 2002. And only on November 19th did the Pentagon real­ize it needed more money to armor up its trucks?

December 10th, 2004 | Armor | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.