The MRAP Boondoggle
Abstract
Last summer, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said [1] that the Pentagon's Joint Program Office for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles (JPO-MRAP), a $45 billion program to design, manufacture, and deploy 27,000 heavily protected vehicles into Iraq and Afghanistan, had saved "thousands and thousands of lives." The Joint Program Office drilled down a more specific figure: MRAPs, as they're known in military jargon, saved the lives of 40,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. In other words, without MRAPs, the number of combat deaths from those wars would be comparable to the number killed in Korea or VietnamThe Joint Program Office put a specific number on what was becoming the conventional wisdom on the new military machinery. Over the past few years, media outlets, including the Boston Herald [2] and USA Today [3], repeatedly reported on the life-saving power of MRAPs. The Pentagon underscored the news with its own official releases [4]. Purchases of MRAPs have declined recently due to the withdrawal of forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, but the Defense Department continues to focus on the vehicle -- it recently awarded a contract [5] for more MRAPs, with the authority to purchase another 5,244 of them in the future. Just last week, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal argued [6], "the success the Army and Marines have had with [the MRAP] shows what happens when the Pentagon throws out the bureaucratic rule book and takes on a more World War II-style business model."
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jul 26, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA563606
Entities
People
- Chris Rohlfs
- Ryan J Sullivan
Organizations
- Naval Postgraduate School