There’s an article in this morning’s New York Times about the limitations of our new MRAP (mine-resistant armored personnel carrier). It seems a recent roadside bomb managed to kill the gunner, although the other passengers survived with only broken feet and lacerations. The article is interesting, but not earth shattering. No one ever said that the MRAP could sustain any explosion, and it did largely do its job in an blast “large enough “to take out” a heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle.”
What I found alarming is buried deep in the article. The MRAP was on a mission:
Saturday’s deadly attack came on the first day of an operation to clear insurgents from southern Arab Jabour, a rural, overwhelmingly Sunni area less than 10 miles southeast of Baghdad on the Tigris River. The primary target is Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown extremist group that American intelligence says is foreign led.
The bomb went off at 4:45 p.m., as engineers were driving beside an irrigation ditch to support soldiers of the First Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, who had been clearing farmhouses and villages since a dawn air assault.
That might seem like an ordinary mission, but let’s look at that air assault.
The threat from buried bombs was well known before of the operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.’s.
My first reaction is to ask how much 100,000 pounds of bombs cost to manufacture and ship to Iraq. Are we using 100,000 pounds of bombs to rototill villages before our troops enter them, all in an (apparently failed) attempt to defuse Improvised Explosive Devices (IED’s)?
[Ed. note: Arab Jabour is, by one report, “15km long, 5km wide”].
That strikes me as insane. If that is the cost of a U.S. convoy entering a hostile village (this one, a mere 10 miles from Baghdad) then we cannot afford to do convoys. This is a scam. Who’s making these bombs? What are their profit margins?
And what is the collateral damage from operations like this?
