Insurgency Threw a Wrench Into Military’s Supply Planning

Prewar forecasts that failed to account for a lengthy and bloody insurgency have left the military struggling to provide all the equipment needed to do battle in Iraq, defense officials said Monday.

The Army has made substantial progress in equipping soldiers since December, when the top ground commander in Iraq complained of shortages to his superiors. But post-invasion projections that did not account for persistent assaults on U.S. troops have left supply strategists straining to catch up, even as they contend with equipping the troops over increasingly perilous Iraqi roads.

The insurgency revealed gaps in the effort to equip the troops, said a senior official who oversees Army supply.

“We had communications problems, we had infrastructure problems in the theater,” said Gary Motsek, director of support operations for the Army Materiel Command at Ft. Belvoir, Va. “The war clearly went on longer than expected, based upon what we thought we had to do. And the nature of the war changed.”

Body and vehicle armor were the most glaring shortages. While every American soldier in Iraq has had body armor since January, and the backlog on Humvees needing repair has gone from hundreds to zero since last winter, many vehicles still lack armor.

Heavy use has led to a persistent shortage of critical parts for helicopters, Humvees and tanks, according to a forthcoming Department of Defense study.

“The requirements issued from the theater have changed many, many times,” said one Army official who deals with troop readiness issues. “Eighteen months ago, we were supposed to be gone from Iraq by now. So how much do you buy?”

The supply problems were highlighted last week after an Army Reserve unit in Iraq disobeyed a direct order to deliver food, fuel and other supplies. The soldiers of the 343rd Quartermaster Company, from South Carolina, said they believed that the poor condition of their fuel trucks and the lack of armored vehicles to escort them meant they were being asked to perform a “suicide mission,” the troops’ family members said. The Army has begun an investigation.

Army officials say they are improving their ability to stock parts and equipment, have boosted the readiness rates of tanks and helicopters and shortened waits for new supplies. Yet, in some categories, they still fall short of their own goals.

The time it takes to get critical equipment to the battleground dropped from a peak of 53 days in December to 24 days last month. But the Army is still short of its goal -- 14 days -- largely because insurgents have made attacking supply convoys with roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades a central part of their strategy.

In response, the Army is doing more repairs in Iraq and storing parts in Kuwait. To minimize the number of troops and contractors forced to make the perilous 800-mile trek from Kuwait, equipment bound for central and northern Iraq is being airlifted to a distribution center in Balad, about an hour’s drive north of Baghdad. Because they consider the roads unsafe, the Marines have begun airdropping their equipment directly into central Iraq.

The intensity of the Iraqi insurgency has also strained the equipment far more than Pentagon planners initially expected.

An unreleased “Equipment Stress Study,” portions of which were described to The Times, estimates that it would cost roughly $9.6 billion annually just to address the normal wear and tear on the Pentagon’s trucks, tanks and helicopters. The Army’s wheeled “Stryker” vehicles, now deployed in Iraq, were being driven an average 1,200 miles a month, nearly six times the anticipated average of 208.

Humvees were being driven six to eight times their training rate, and helicopters were used at two to three times the usual rate, officials said. The tracks on M1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles were being replaced at four times the normal rate, according to the study.

Despite heavy use that has increased as insurgents have intensified their fire, the Army Materiel Command has managed to boost readiness rates.

Since Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top ground commander in Iraq, complained of shortages in a Dec. 4, 2003, letter to superiors, readiness has risen from 73% to 78% for Chinook helicopters -- above the goal of 75%. Black Hawk UH60-A helicopters went from 66% to 80% over the same period, while the TPA-36 and TPA-37 antiballistic mortar-tracking radars Sanchez complained about have jumped from 86% to 100%, Motsek said.

The share of items Army supply depots list as “zero balance” -- or absent from supply shelves -- has dropped from between 25% and 40% last year, depending on the depot, to an average of 14% this year, just above the peacetime goal of 10%.

Defense officials note Army goals do not expect a 100% readiness rate for equipment. And outside analysts caution that every major military conflict has forced commanders to retool to face changing conditions.

Pentagon officials concede that reservists, who make up roughly 40% of the U.S. force in Iraq, have long been a lower priority than active-duty soldiers when it comes to meeting equipment demands. During the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, they say, there was never a push inside the Pentagon to upgrade reservists’ equipment to the standard of active duty troops.

Such an effort now, they say, would take several years and billions of dollars. “The reserves were a lower priority for funding. Now we are using them in a high-priority role,” an Army official said on condition of anonymity. “It’s not like we can fix the problem for the next rotation going into Iraq. We can’t.”

Still, current conditions are a vast improvement over those when the war began. Then, many units were issued Humvees that lacked armor plating, doors or roofs. Soldiers improvised their own armor by welding steel plates to their vehicles and covering floorboards with sandbags. In time, the Army issued special armor “kits” to units or replaced “soft skinned” vehicles with “up armored” models.

After about five months, 1st Sgt. Paul Balboa, a California National Guardsman whose company provides armed escorts for supply convoys and VIPs, said most of his unit’s Humvees were fully armored, but not all of them.

Times staff writers Esther Schrader in Washington and Monte Morin in Baghdad and Times researcher Mark Madden in Washington contributed to this report.