Analysis: Army struggles to keep vehicles on battlefields

TEXARKANA, Texas - The Army Humvees wait forlornly, lost in acres of damaged war machines with blown engines, missing hoods and scavenged parts. Grease-pencil scrawls turn windshields cracked in Iraq and Afghanistan into gripe lists. Soldiers’ complaints about breakdowns are stuck with duct tape.

All around are Humvees choked in Kuwaiti dust, trucks that succumbed to the weight of armor welded on by soldiers and broken-down Bradley fighting vehicles from Iraq, their motorized ramps held up by industrial-strength bungee cords.

With the U.S. military critically overextended in manpower and funding, this crowded repair yard is yet another sign of the strain on the Pentagon - barely enough equipment to go around on the battlefield and not enough to train units back home. A backlog of hundreds of vehicles awaits repairs in one lot alone, a testament to extraordinary wear and tear on U.S. military equipment.

"Half of it is in Iraq or Afghanistan, the other half of it is in the shop. Whatever’s not in Iraq or Afghanistan is in pretty bad shape," said Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Primarily, training is hampered by the backlog, but the margins for equipment availability have rarely been so narrow for the U.S. military. If the nation doesn’t have another war, O’Hanlon observed, "I think we’ll scrape by."

Read the rest at the Columbia Tribune