Blog post

Brother, Can You Spare an MRAP?
Posted by Perry Jefferies on December 15

Contrast this with the revelation that the Marines drug their feet on acquiring properly armored vehicles for their troops in Iraq:

$27B Marine Corps vehicle program at crossroads - Salon.com
Dec 14th, 2008 | ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. -- The Pentagon spent more than $1 billion and 12 years developing a high-speed vehicle made to carry Marines from sea to shore only to have it fail miserably in 2006. It was overweight, sprung leaks and constantly broke down.
Once again we see the choices that bureaucrats far from the front lines and ones with vested interests in future job opportunities make with the welfare of those they should be looking out for. Reminds me of the money being flushed for "missile defense" or on multi-national contracting in Iraq while the average troop struggles with a 40 pound vest and too many Iraqis are still drinking from puddles.

It takes a lot of players to be complicit in epic fails like this vehicle - program advocates without oversight, congressmen with vested interests in jobs programs that don't want to admit it, companies that are addicted to federal money. But in the end it is program leadership up and down the channel that decide to continue allocating resources into blackhole projects. Without accountability and transparency, these problems will never be corrected. There are a lot of jokes about how rough Marines like to live and serve. But at some point, some of their leaders walked away from that and left their charges to live in the dirt while they checked into the Ritz-Carlton of contracting.

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