Did the Delay in MRAP Appropriations Cost Lives?

Some folks seem to think so.

MRAP Contract Oversight

POGO wants an investigation into how the contracts were awarded.

More on the MRAP Casualty

Catching up on the news that the Army suffered it's first casualty in an MRAP since billions of dollars were allocated to the program last fall, here's a bit of a report that details what happened:

The Soldier who died Jan. 19 was the gunner who sits atop the MRAP vehicle. Three crew members tucked inside the cabin were wounded. The vehicle rolled over after the blast and it was not clear how the gunner died - from wounds in the explosion or in the subsequent roll-over.

MRAPs in Transition

The official Pentagon response to yesterday's MRAP death has been both expected and informative:

[Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff] Morrell told reporters that commanders on the ground estimate the three survivors might not have escaped life-threatening injuries in a less-protected vehicle.

“I think what’s remarkable about the attack is the fact that the crew compartment, despite how large the bomb was, was not compromised by the IED, and that the three crew members inside walked away with, I believe, cuts and broken bones in their feet,” he said. “I think everybody is still amazed that the fact that, despite the size of this bomb, these vehicles are proven to be every bit as strong and as life-saving as we hoped they would be.”

That's putting quite the silver lining on this issue. It also implies that the death occurred in the truck's cab, to either the driver or someone sitting in the passenger seat.

Regardless, the Armchair Generalist puts things a little more bluntly:

Anyone who still has the fantasy that the MRAPs were a ticket to riding out the violence in Iraq had better wake up. This potential $20 billion investment by the US government is going to be defeated by less than a million dollars worth of fertilizer, explosives, and pressure plates. This isn't the solution for general movement on the battlefield.

[He goes on to cite an interesting article in Armed Forces Journal, well worth a read.]

MORE: Check out Germany's answer to the MRAP.

MRAPs & Casualties

A few months ago I spent a lot of time tracking the development of the Army's mine resistant armor protected (MRAPs) vehicles as the Pentagon began awarding what would turn out to be billions of dollars in contracts to companies like Oshkosh Truck to build what were seen by many to be the solution to the IED problem in Iraq.

But anyone who followed the discussion closely knows that this was hardly the consensus. There was considerable debate about the effectiveness of the program. Some were critical of the bulky size of the trucks, others were concerned about the "fortress mentality" that MRAPs seemed to project to Iraqis. Of notable interest was the cost and their shelf-life. One general even suggested that putting MRAPs into the field was tantamount to an open invitation to the enemy to attack them. Unfortunately, this debate did not seem to break out of defense appropriations circles until after the contracts were awarded.

Instead a number of people in Washington, on both sides of the aisle, used "We must support the troops!" rhetoric to gain support for the massive spending measures without ever asking if this was a good way of supporting the troops. Up until the contracts were awarded MRAPs had enjoyed vocal support from soldiers on the ground who has survived roadside attacks and ambushes. Many even suggested that the trucks were more important than ever due to the development and use of EFPs in the battlefield.

I haven't blogged about MRAPs in a while, largely because the direction their news has taken has become far more technical than I think anyone but me would care to bother with, but I have been keeping up with their use and deployment. Unfortunately, it became painfully obvious even well before the deployment that MRAPs were not going to be the panacea that many suggested they could be.

Now, for the first time since the awarding of the contracts last fall, a soldier has been killed by a roadside ambush while serving inside an MRAP.

The implications are really rather staggering. The Pentagon put a lot of their eggs into the MRAP basket. If anything, the MRAP was successful in providing soldiers with tremendous piece of mind -- one has to wonder if that will still be the case.

I'm sure there will be plenty more to say on this topic soon enough.

Statistic of the Day

From the Weekly Standard:

“Seventy-two percent of the world’s bridges cannot hold the MRAP,” says Brig. Gen. Ronald Johnson, assistant deputy commander for plans, policies and operations.

Frag Kits, War Taxes, and EFPs

Christian Lowe digs up of a couple of pieces on the current MRAP appropriations bonanza, noting that the mine resistant ambush protected vehicles arriving in Iraq may already be outdated and will require a frag kit to withstand EFPs:

As I predicted, it looks like frantic MRAP procurement is squeezing out the Humvee replacement the services really need. Iraq involvement will wane, MRAPs will be sitting unused in motor pools and the troops will be riding around in 1980s-era Humvees for another decade at least.

OK, OK, I know I’m going to get several mortar barrages about how heartless I am. But let’s look at the numbers. Only 400 of the 1,500 MRAPs that are supposed to be shipped to Iraq this year have arrived. Other than Marines who’d already had some in-theater, I have yet to hear of a commander that has the number he’d requested. So, how is it that IED attacks are way down and that U.S. casualties have dropped like a rock over the last month.

Travis Sharp points out the highlights in the Senate's FY08 Pentagon budget allocations bill ...

And Wisconsin's Rep. Obey proposes what is sure to be a controversial "war tax":

The plan unveiled today by House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey, Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John P. "Jack" Murtha and Rep. Jim McGovern would spread the sacrifice among all taxpayers by tacking a "war surcharge" on top of the federal income tax. Americans would pay up to 15 percent more on their taxes in order to raise the $150 billion needed annually to keep the war going.

[...]

Obey said his committee would not consider President Bush’s $190 billion request for the war until the new year – and signaled that he was now willing to condition future war funding on plans for a U.S. withdrawal. That would be a change for Democrats, who have tried to attach strings to war spending, but have said that they would not try to end the war by cutting off funding for the troops.

Defend America has a short piece on MRAP mechanics ...

As far as getting the trucks to the theater is concerned, the process appears to be moving slowly, at least in Anbar province ...

Part III of the Washington Post's series on IEDs discusses the impact of EFPs in the war.

MRAP Deadline

The deadline for MRAP contract submissions were due to today and if Wall Street has anything to say about, South Carolina's Force Protection will be the big winner, but that's not to say that Oshkosh Truck will not receive its fair share of orders.

Right now a congressional committee will hammer out an appropriations bill that passed the Senate today, complete with the Biden amendment that allocates $23.6 billion for additional MRAP purchases. The final MRAP orders will depend on how much of that sum survives the committee process.

MORE: I nearly forgot ... Part II of the Post's IED special report.

Secondly -- and I don't really know what to say about this -- the Manhattan Project cost roughly $2 billion in 1940's dollars (and about $20 billion in mid-1990's dollars), just to give you an idea of the scale of what DOD is working with here. Again, it's not really fair to compare the MRAP program with the with the Manhattan Project in terms of purpose, but we are rapidly getting to the point where we have no choice but speak of them in the same breath with regard to cost.

EVEN MORE: I have no idea how long it will take for the MRAP proposals to be vetted and approved, but in the meantime take solace in the fact that Oshkosh Truck won a rather large ($185,296,566 million) contract from the Army today to make more HEMTTs.

The WaPo IED Report, Part I

According to the Washington Post, the IED jammers I've noticed coming down the appropriations pipeline (here and here) have been a huge part of explosive countermeasures in bothe Afghanistan and Iraq:

If no one foresaw that within four years more than 30,000 jammers of all sorts would be in Iraq, a few suspected that something big had started. "We're going to need a lot more jammers," Col. Bruce Jette, who commanded the Army's Rapid Equipping Force at Fort Belvoir, told a Fort Monmouth engineer in August 2003. "And eventually we're going to need a jammer on every vehicle."

The history of these jammers is actually pretty amazing and winds through extremely classified Secret Service projects to protect presidential motorcades to measures used by the Navy:

For decades, electronic countermeasures had been a vital part of airborne combat for Navy fliers. Submariners also considered it a "core mission," as did surface ship officers. "It's how I deal with cruise missiles coming at me," said Rear Adm. Arch Macy, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Washington.

One of the article's more sobering moments is a series of statistics that shed light into just how pervasive the IED probably is in Iraq:

Yet U.S. strategists, who before the invasion failed to anticipate an insurgency, also drafted no comprehensive plans for securing thousands of munitions caches, now estimated to have held at least 650,000 tons and perhaps more than 1 million tons of explosives...

More than a year after the invasion "only 40 percent of Iraq's pre-war munitions inventory was secured or destroyed," the Congressional Research Service reported this summer.

Tens of thousands of tons probably were pilfered, U.S. government analysts believe. (If properly positioned, 20 pounds of high explosive can destroy any vehicle the Army owns.) The lax control would continue long after Hussein was routed: 10,000 or more blasting caps -- also vital to bombmaking -- vanished from an Iraqi bureau of mines storage facility in 2004, along with "thousands of kilometers" of detonation cord, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst.

(Emphasis added)

Think about that bolded parenthetical sentence for a second. That's an incredible neutralizing figure illustrated by this anecdote:

A large explosion along a roadbed near Balad in October of that year flung a 70-ton M1A2 Abrams tank down an embankment, shearing off the turret and killing two crewmen.

If those numbers aren't frightening enough the insurgents have also demonstrated a wily capacity to adapt on the battlefield:

Camouflage remained simple, with bombs tucked in roadkill or behind highway guardrails. (Soldiers soon ripped out hundreds of miles of guardrail.) Emplacers often used the same "blow hole" repeatedly, returning to familiar roadside "hot spots" again and again. But early in the insurgency, before U.S. troops were better trained, only about one bomb in 10 was found and neutralized, according to an Army colonel.

[...]

Each week, the cat-and-mouse game expanded. When coalition convoys routinely began stopping 300 yards from a suspected IED, insurgents planted easily spotted hoax bombs to halt traffic, then detonated explosives that had been hidden where a convoy would most likely pull over.

So where does the MRAP fit into the milieu? Rick Atkinson, the article's author, suggests that the delay in moving MRAPs into the theater was both an administrative and field decision:

Two weeks after taking command from the retiring Gen. Tommy R. Franks, Abizaid publicly described resistance in Iraq as "a classical guerrilla-style campaign," a blunt appraisal that reportedly irked the Pentagon's civilian leadership. But the amount of unsecured ammunition in Iraq, particularly in Sunni regions, alarmed him. So did the realization that many Iraqi military officers -- unemployed and disgruntled after the national army was disbanded in late May -- possessed extensive skill in handling explosives.

Abizaid hoped that American technical savvy would produce a gadget that could detect bombs at a distance, "a scientific molecular sniffer, or something," as he put it. "We thought the problem would spread," Abizaid later reflected, "but it didn't appear overly sophisticated." Underestimating the enemy's creativity and overestimating American ingenuity, a pattern established before the war began, continued long after the capture of Baghdad.

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior U.S. ground commander in Iraq, told Pentagon strategists that he hoped to minimize the military's "footprint" in Iraq by maintaining an occupation force that was two-thirds motorized and only one-third mechanized. "What I don't want is a lot of tanks and Bradleys," Sanchez said, according to a senior Army commander.

The rest of piece details a special forces group that was assembled to assess the IED threat in Iraq and recommend countermeasures. and some of the initial measures (such as up-armored Humvees) that were used against the threat. Atkinson concludes the article by hinting at another struggle likely to be a major part of the IED story: the money issue.

Creation of the Joint IED Task Force would dramatically expand the U.S. effort. A $100 million budget in fiscal 2004 would mushroom to $1.3 billion in 2005. In subsequent meetings with industry executives and the national research laboratories, Wolfowitz declared that there was no higher priority. Within the Defense Department, countering IEDs would be second only to exterminating Osama bin Laden.

In fact, IEDs were likely more important than finding bin Laden at the time or at least quickly becoming so, as the CIA's bin Laden unit was in the process of disbanding in late 2005.

MORE: The Armchair Generalist weighs in.

EVEN MORE: Max Boot: "[T]echnology seldom confers a lasting advantage in military affairs. What counts is not having the right tools per se, but how you make use of them, and especially whether you can adapt faster than your adversaries."

Wash Post to do in-depth IED Report

I'm psyched. It looks like it's going to be a big one (four parts).

I imagine the timing of the series has a lot to do with the announcement of the MRAP contracts on Monday.

MRAP Countdown

* This is odd, and also gives some insight into just what a belabored process building an MRAP is:

Spartan Chassis Inc. said it received a $52-million subcontract from Force Protection Inc. to support the production of Cougar series advanced tactical wheeled vehicles for military use.

The contract calls for the Charlotte-based unit of Spartan Motors Inc., the maker of custom chassis for recreational and emergency response cars and trucks, to supply and integrate key chassis components for the vehicles by March 2008.

March? That's 6 months from now ... and it's not like the chassis is something you can just affix to the hood at the end of production.

* A run-of-the-mill editorial seems to be in syndication, while a far more circumspect piece ran in Washington state:

But are "economies of scale" even part of the military vocabulary? If the MRAPs are replacing the Humvee, shouldn't it follow that fewer Humvees will be needed? And would a cynic be very far off base if he or she wondered at why refurbishing and replacing of equipment is let slide to the point that it takes billions of dollars in huge catch-up doses to bring it back to reasonable standards?

Psychic Computers, IED Jammers, and Big Fricking Trucks

Oshkosh Truck won a $16+ million contract from the Army to make M1070 Heavy Equipment Transporter System (HETS) trucks (you may have seen them around town, albeit rarely). From GlobalSecurity.org:

Oshkosh Truck Corp., Oshkosh, Wis., was awarded on Sept. 21, 2007, a $16,847,245 firm-fixed-price contract for Foreign Military Sale of Heavy Equipment Transporter System M1070 Tractors, Trailers, and Spares. Work will be performed in Oshkosh, Wis. (71 percent), Princeton, Ky. (22 percent), Ann Arbor, Mich. (2.55 percent), Indianapolis, Ind. (0.45 percent), and Egypt (4 percent), and is expected to be completed by Dec. 31, 2009. Contract funds will not expire at the end of the current fiscal year. This was a sole source contract initiated on Jan. 25, 2007. The U.S. Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command, Warren, Mich., is the contracting activity (W56HZV-07-C-0594).

Also from today's contract announcements, Pegasus was awarded a contract to make the kind of IED jammers that may possibly be found in MRAPs:

Pegasus Global Strategic Solutions, LLC, Reston, Va., is being awarded a $6,903,614 firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract to provide retro-fit of 100 Jukebox jammers and provide engineering and technical support for the 1,001 Jukebox systems currently fielded under the Counter-Radio-Controlled Improvised Electronic Warfare (CREW) system. Contractor will provide field service representatives; provide depot services, repair parts, system troubleshooting, and electronic repair. Work will be performed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is expected to be completed by June 2008. Contract funds in the amount of $6,903,614, will expire at the end of the current fiscal year. The contract was not competitively procured. The Naval Sea Systems Command, Indian Head Division, Indian Head, Md., is the contracting agency. (N00174-07-D-0016)

But the most interesting contract was a $6 million job awarded to BBN Technologies Corp. out of Boston for its Integrated Crisis Early Warning System (ICEWS) program, which is intended to be a "prototype system of integrated computational social and political science models that forecast the occurrence and level of intensity of various conflict events of interest often associated with country instability. The work will examine and identify models relevant to country instability, develop predictive models for conflict events of interest, and integrate them into a single predictive model for potential use by Unified Combatant Command (COCOMs)."

In other words, they're trying to design a computer program that will predict the future.

Best of luck with that, guys ...

MORE: Gen. Arthur Lichte, the new leader of Air Mobility Command, also used the MRAP delivery as a reason for renovating the Air Force's fleet:

[Gen. Lichte] used figures at an Air Force Association symposium to underscore the command’s importance: 410 Cougar and Buffalo Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles sent to Iraq and Afghanistan so far; mobility command aircraft departures once every 85 seconds this week; and precise GPS-coordinated cargo drops from 25,000 feet in the air.

Lichte also said air cargo lifts have saved lives by keeping 9,400 personnel and 3,900 trucks off roads laced with improvised explosive devices. And medical air lifts, he said, have transported wounded troops — one involving a man with a knife jammed in his head by an Iraqi militant — from battlefield attacks to U.S. hospitals in 24 hours.

[...]

But the command, Lichte said, is beginning to suffer as its aircraft age. Its C-130 fleet is, on average, 42 years old. The E model KC-135 Stratotankers are, on average, more than 49 years old. With age comes problems, he said, such as cracks on C-17 thrust reverse systems and cracked equipment on C-5s.

Defense Stocks Rise with MRAP News

No surprise here:

Defense stocks on Wednesday hit new highs as Defense Secretary Robert Gates requested an extra $42 billion in funding from Congress to cover military costs in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2008.

The AMEX Defense Index, which tracks 14 major defense company stocks, rose 14.25 to a high of 1,686.72 in afternoon trading. Since last year, the index has risen roughly 47 percent, outperforming the broader S&P 500 index, which has climbed nearly 15 percent over the same period.

Truck is specifically named as one of the beneficiaries of Gates' announcement; and its stock price did indeed see a jump, closing up 1.4% at $57.80 a share.

The midterm outlook for military spending continues to look strong:

Bank of America (NYSE:BAC) analyst Robert Stallard said he expects war-related spending in fiscal 2009 and fiscal 2010 to be $170 billion and $150 billion, respectively. And even after the peak, war spending is still likely to be more than $100 billion annually for the next few years to refurbish and replace war torn equipment used in Iraq.

The size of the supplemental allocation is now raising a lot of eye brows and will likely lead to more people equating DOD's investment in troop safety with investment in an ongoing war:

Spending $23.6 billion on fortified vehicles that will take years to produce is an admission that you [Sen. Biden] are planning a long-term occupation of a hostile population in Iraq, and possibly Iran.

Incidentally, this is the first opinion I have read that sees the push for more MRAPs with a possible invasion of Iran (obviously, since the MRAP can't fly, we're talking about more than just air strikes under these circumstances).

Even though the money being spent on MRAP production is huge, even by defense standards, there are signs of an ancillary effect occurring in other areas of Pentagon spending. Today Lockhead Martin used the MRAP as a reason for further Air Force investment in transport/cargo planes like the C-5 Galaxy:

[LM Aeronautics Business Development Vice President Jim] Grant said modernizing the C-5 fleet remains a fiscally sound solution for meeting the nation's strategic airlift requirements. "The C-5 modernization program capitalizes on the U.S. Air Force's investment in the C-5 and ensures this critical national strategic airlift resource continues serving the warfighter for years to come," said Grant. "Analysis and test data indicates that the C-5M program will meet or exceed all customer requirements, including those necessary to meet wartime objectives to move troops, very large loads and critical outsize cargo, like Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles."

So one could argue that a snowball effect is likely to occur in the future as more and more defense programs begin to see an advantage in demonstrating a support role for the expensive MRAP project. Yet there is a good deal of truth to these sales pitches, one that belies a very real concern that the MRAP will change the way the military functions:

The size of the MRAP may also change the way military units operate. The vehicles are too large to be sling-loaded on a helicopter, meaning they cannot be used in airmobile operations. The behemoth trucks are also too large for some streets. Gen Brogan said he doubted the smaller Humvee would be phased out entirely. "Clearly, these have a different level of protection than an uparmoured Humvee," he said. "There are some villes [towns], though, where roads are narrow, [it's a] constricted area. So I don't think every single Humvee will ever be supplanted. How many are replaced are decisions that will be made by the operations commanders, not by the acquisition community."

Now might be a good time to mention that the estimated cost of $1 million per vehicle is just the base price of an individual MRAP and does not include things like maintenance and fuel.

But the price is not deterring Pentagon procurement officers:

Air Force Gen. Norton A. Schwartz arrived Saturday at the Jacksonville [AR] Museum of Military History with a six-member security detail as a special guest at the 10th anniversary luncheon of the Eaker Chapter of the Distinguished Flying Cross Society.

The four-star general is commander of the Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base, Ill. The command manages air, land and sea transportation for the Department of Defense...

Besides visiting the museum, Schwartz honored the DFCS members by attending their luncheon...

[...]

After the luncheon, Schwartz spoke to the group about the importance of the Air Force transporting MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) vehicles to the Middle East. The vehicles have a v-shaped underside to deflect the explosions from mines and improvised explosive devices.

Mad (MRAP) Money

The tab for the MRAP program is getting bigger and bigger:

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates will go before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Wednesday, when he is expected to deliver budget amendments to Congress that will substantially increase the president's 2008 war spending to $200 billion from the approximately $150 billion that the administration initially estimated it would need in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The supplemental funding request is expected to include some $17 billion for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (or MRAP) vehicles, which officials say will help step up production from the 82 MRAPs made in June to some 1,300 a month by December. The vehicles are designed to help deflect the effect of roadside bombs, also known as improvised explosive devices (or IEDs), which remain the biggest killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. The Pentagon has ordered a total of 6,415 MRAPs to date—orders expected to be completed by March.

That's less than the $23.6 billion Sen. Joe Biden is asking for, but considerably more than the $5.3 billion requested by the White House.

Meanwhile, doubts continue to surface regarding the anticipated efficacy of the MRAP program.

MORE: Here's a breakdown of where the MRAPs will be going:

Under the new authorized figure, the Marine Corps would still be allocated 3,700 MRAPs, the Air Force 697, the Navy 544, and U.S. Special Operations Command 333, Morrell said.

The Day's MRAP News

As we've mentioned earlier, the MRAP has not been immune to criticism, some of the most biting of which can be found here:

But like all of the previous anti-IED programs, the MRAP effort will only add more expense to the losing effort in Iraq. While the MRAPs will provide additional protection to American soldiers on the ground, they will not solve the IED problem. Indeed, the deployment of the MRAPs exposes three interconnected points that continue to frustrate U.S. efforts in Iraq:

1. The IEDs have put the U.S. military in Iraq in a defensive posture. And militaries who play defense all the time don't win wars.

2. The MRAPs will dramatically increase the size of the already gigantic logistics "tail" that sustains the U.S. military in Iraq. The larger the tail, the more vulnerable the military becomes.

3. The new fleet of MRAPs won't make any difference in the overall casualty rate for U.S. soldiers. That's the opinion of a Defense Department analyst who has worked on the IED problem for several years and was recently in Iraq.

But those critiques aren't stopping some voices to call for more MRAPs. The Kansas City Star recently ran an editorial seemingly calling for the Pentagon to do everything it possibly could to increase production:

By December, defense officials hope manufacturers will be cranking out the new vehicles, called Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected vehicles, at a rate of more than 1,300 per month. That means it will take months to meet the goal of trading all the Humvees in Iraq with safer vehicles.

[...]

Meanwhile, the Pentagon is still shifting the numbers it will request. First, the Army asked for 2,500 and the Marines requested 3,700.

After Gates said the number should be much higher, the Army said it would need 17,700. Then it backed away: The latest Army request is for 10,000, but because of the production bottleneck that goal can’t be met for some time to come.

Congress should act rapidly on the request, and determine whether there are feasible ways to boost production.

(Emphasis added)

But production bottlenecks might not be the only thing holding up deliveries. The appropriations process for the MRAP is causing friction between the White House and Congressional Democrats:

Even with [Appropriations Chair Rep. David] Obey's assurances, however, the short-term bill could become contentious later this week if other Democrats push to increase spending in some areas. The temporary measure will include funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania, chair of the House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. He said the temporary budget would include the $5.3 billion in additional spending for the Iraq war that Bush had recently requested for mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles, which are used to shield soldiers from roadside bombs.

(Emphasis added)

Sen. Joe Biden has introduced a bill that would increase MRAP spending next year to $23.6 billion, all of which may become part of the largest Iraq War spending budget to date.

JLTV Put on Hold

The Army and Marines have put the kibosh on on the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle:

Though it's unstated in the Pentagon's decision, the burgeoning requirement for about a zillion Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles has likely made JLTV all but irrelevant, or at least unfundable.

The JLTV, the contract for which Oshkosh Truck won in 2006, was supposed to replace the current fleet of Humvees.

MRAP Contract Countdown

We're at 8 days -- that's one week from tomorrow -- until DOD announces where the MRAP II contracts are going. There's a good chance that the demand for the vehicle will make the Pentagon more likely to distribute a portion of the pie to as many companies that are able to build a MRAP to spec, so there's a good chance that Oshkosh Truck will be getting some orders.

As the date approaches local newspapers in the areas that are likely to be affected by the potentially $11 billion in defense disbursements are starting to run stories on the potential economic windfall. For instance, in Anniston, Alabama:

General Dynamics hired 270 workers in Oxford earlier this year to build a round of MRAPs authorized last year. The company already built Stryker and Fox combat vehicles in Calhoun County in partnership with the Anniston Army Depot, a 15,000-acre base that specializes in building, repairing and testing tanks and armored cars. It goes by the slogan "Pit Crew of the American Warfighter."

And in Charlotte, Michigan:

Sztykiel said Spartan officials had no idea three or four years ago that they would be entering the military vehicle business. But a former Spartan supplier suggested to Force Protection Inc., a builder of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles (MRAPs) for the U.S. military, that Spartan could help boost production efficiency -- a critical need due to a surge in demand for such vehicles in Iraq.

Spartan did its first MRAP assembly in July 2005, attaching a Spartan chassis to a hull designed with extra underbody armor to protect soldiers from roadside bombs and land mines.

Specialty vehicles, mostly MRAPs, provided 31% of Spartan sales last quarter, up from 9% a year earlier. The company is looking to boost MRAP output to 20 vehicles a day next month, from eight to 10 per day now. A hundred new Spartan workers will be added by Oct. 20 to help meet demand, said Richard Schalter, president of the Spartan Chassis operating unit.

MRAPs for Iraqis

Take it away, War is Boring.

MORE: I mentioned this earlier, but here's some more ... (and more).

Many More MRAPs in the Pentagon Appropriations Queue

USA Today is reporting that the Army wants a more MRAPs -- many more MRAPs:

WASHINGTON — The Army has decided to ask for 10,000 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles to counter the threat of makeshift bombs in Iraq, according to one of the program's top congressional supporters.

The new request is nearly four times the 2,700 vehicles, known as MRAPs, that the Army had sought. That's still not enough, said Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., who was briefed on the change by the Defense Department. Biden cited a request this year for 17,770 of the vehicles for the Army by Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, the No. 2 military commander in Iraq.

[...]

John Young, chairman of the Defense Department's MRAP Task Force, has said the Pentagon hopes to build 1,300 a month by December.

[...]

Army and Pentagon officials declined Tuesday to comment on the new MRAP request. So far, the Pentagon has ordered 6,500 MRAPs, valued at about $5 billion.

[...]

In June, an Army team determined it needed 17,770 MRAPs, enough to replace all of its armored Humvees. Days later, however, the Army backed away from that number pending further study.

To give you an idea of just how big this program has gotten, take a look at this:

In July 2007, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates asked Congress for approval to transfer nearly $1.2 billion to the Pentagon's Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) program to procure an additional 2,650 vehicles. If approved, the fund transfer will make MRAP the Defense Department's third-largest acquisition program, behind only the missile defense and Joint Strike Fighter programs.

In 2005 the missile defense program's budget was $10 billion dollars. The Joint Strike Fighter's annual budget for this fiscal year is $6.1 billion.

More (Maybe?) MRAP News

Although this notice doesn't mention it directly, I'd imagine this type of equipment would be used inside an MRAP.