Target Centermass

Day: January 12, 2006

  • Army Pledges to Equip GIs with Better Armor

    The body armor story. Yet again.

    The Army announced Wednesday that it plans to distribute 230,000 side-protecting armor inserts to troops in Iraq over the next year amid growing criticism that the Pentagon has delayed life-saving upgrades to body armor.

    Last year, the armed forces medical examiner found that 80 percent of the Marines who died of torso wounds from March 2003 to June 2005 in Iraq might have lived if their vests had contained additional protection for the sides, arms and neck.

    That report, leaked to news outlets last week, prompted Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner (R-Va.) to summon Pentagon brass to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to explain delays and materials shortages that have plagued the armor programs of the Army and Marines.

    “We will complete the delivery of this particular equipment this year … 230,000 that will be done throughout this year,” Army Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Sorenson said of the side plates.

    Sorenson refused to provide details on production and distribution, which annoyed some Democrats who attended the closed-door meeting. “We wanted to know why the Army has had all these delays and he didn’t have a good answer,” said one Senate staffer.

    Marine commanders requested improvements to side armor last June, but few of the inserts have made it to those fighting. That has prompted criticism from Senate Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who said hundreds of soldiers may have died as a result of inadequate armor.

    The Army blamed delays on material shortages and pointed out that it has altered its armored vest design seven times to date.

    As Confederate Yankee shows us, the Army is constantly testing and evaluating armor concepts, including even one that may just satisfy Sen. Clinton and bring about the threat of entire units becoming heat casualties.

  • Hamas Drops Manifesto Call for Israel Destruction

    Take this “development” with one freakin’ big grain of salt.

    Hamas has dropped its call for the destruction of Israel from its manifesto for the Palestinian parliamentary election in a fortnight, a move that brings the group closer to the mainstream Palestinian position of building a state within the boundaries of the occupied territories.

    The Islamist faction, responsible for a long campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks on Israelis, still calls for the maintenance of the armed struggle against occupation. But it steps back from Hamas’s 1988 charter demanding Israel’s eradication and the establishment of a Palestinian state in its place.

    The manifesto makes no mention of the destruction of the Jewish state and instead takes a more ambiguous position by saying that Hamas had decided to compete in the elections because it would contribute to “the establishment of an independent state whose capital is Jerusalem”.

    The shift in emphasis comes as Hamas finds itself under pressure from the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and from foreign governments to accept Israel’s right to exist and to end its violence if it wants to be accepted as a political partner in a future administration.

    The group is expected to emerge as the second largest party after Mr Abbas’s Fatah in the next Palestinian parliament. Opinion polls give it more than a third of the popular vote, built on a campaign against Fatah’s endemic corruption and mismanagement and failure to contain growing criminality, and by claiming credit for driving the Israeli army and settlers out of Gaza.

    But the manifesto continues to emphasise the armed struggle. “Our nation is at a stage of national liberation, and it has the right to act to regain its rights and end the occupation by using all means, including armed resistance,” it says.

    Gazi Hamad, a Hamas candidate in the Gaza Strip, yesterday said the manifesto reflected the group’s position of accepting an interim state based on 1967 borders but leaving a final decision on whether to recognise Israel to future generations.

    “Hamas is talking about the end of the occupation as the basis for a state, but at the same time Hamas is still not ready to recognise the right of Israel to exist,” he said. “We cannot give up the right of the armed struggle because our territory is occupied in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. That is the territory we are fighting to liberate.”

    This is not a case of a leopard changing its spots. Rather, the leopard would simply not prefer to talk about its spots … for now.