Army seeks more armored Humvees
Florida company says it can retrofit 100 more vehicles per month
 |  Humvees can be used as scout vehicles, troop carriers, TOW missile carriers or ambulances. |
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 CNN's Jamie McIntyre reports on the fallout from the planted question.
 Troops grill Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on armor and tour lengths.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Florida company that retrofits U.S. Army Humvees with additional armor will increase production from 450 units a month to 550 by early 2005, the company said Friday night.
The question of whether wheeled vehicles in Iraq are properly armored surfaced Wednesday when a soldier asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about it during a town hall meeting at a staging area in Kuwait.
Armor Holdings Inc. said in a news release it can produce another 100 Humvees per month by next March and is currently 330 vehicles ahead of schedule.
The Army said that until news reports this week it was unaware Armor Holdings, based in Jacksonville, could retrofit more vehicles and so it approached the company. The Army said it thought the company had commitments to other customers, including the Marine Corps.
Francis Harvey, the new secretary of the army, talked with the company's CEO to discuss a deal Friday, a senior Pentagon official said.
Harvey set up a task force to look at other military vehicle contracts to see if more can be made or production increased.
CNN also learned that the U.S. Army Arsenal in Rock Island, Illinois, has been ordered to resume an around the clock schedule to make cab armor kits for 5-ton trucks and fuel tankers.
During the meeting with troops Wednesday at Camp Buehring, Kuwait, a soldier about to deploy to Iraq asked Rumsfeld why more vehicles were not reinforced for battle conditions. (Full story)
"Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?" asked Spc. Thomas Wilson of the 278th Regimental Combat Team, a Tennessee National Guard outfit.
"It's essentially a matter of physics, not a matter of money," Rumsfeld responded. "It's a matter of production and the capability of doing it.
"As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."
The question was planted by a newspaper reporter from the Chattanooga Times Free Press in Tennessee who is embedded with Wilson's unit. (Full story)
Some Democrats charged that Congress has repeatedly gone to the Pentagon about the need to beef up Humvees and had received assurances that the problem had been addressed.
A member of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Gene Taylor of Mississippi, called the situation "ridiculous."
"I don't want to go to a single funeral and have to look a mom or dad or spouse in the eye, and knowing that this Congress has gone to Secretary Rumsfeld, for over a year now, saying, 'Fix the problem. Send us the bill.' "
Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey sent a letter to President Bush on Friday urging for Rumsfeld's resignation.
"As a former soldier, I can't believe that a secretary of defense would be so dismissive of requests for protective gear by our people in uniform," Lautenberg wrote.
Republican John Warner of Virginia, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said his panel would hold more hearings on armoring vehicles and that Congress has provided more than $1 billion to correct the problem.
"Since the first day that the Defense Department identified a shortage of vehicle armor, Congress not only has provided the full armor funding requested by the [Defense] Department, it has gone beyond that, by providing $1.3 billion more for additional armor and armored vehicles in 2003-2004," Warner said in a news release.
Lt. Gen. R. Steven Whitcomb, commander of the 3rd Army who is responsible for ground operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, briefed reporters Thursday on the military's efforts to get more Humvees and transport trucks retrofitted with armor.
Whitcomb said 22,000 of 30,000 vehicles in Iraq, Afghanistan and other Central Command bases have additional armor.
Of those vehicles, 6,000 are factory retrofitted Humvees -- 2,100 short of the military's goal. About another 10,000 Humvees have been outfitted with add-on kits.
About 120 armored Humvees have been destroyed in combat, Whitcomb said.
He said transport trucks were usually retrofitted with "locally fabricated" armor. According to a House Armed Services Committee report, however, only 1,100 of 9,100 haulers in the war zones have added protection, the Associated Press reported.
Matt Salmon, president of ArmorWorks of Tempe, Arizona, told CNN his company, which designs and manufactures high-tech vehicle armor, could double its production from 300 to 600 kits per month.
The Army, however, said that it already has a backlog of kits.
CNN's Jamie McIntyre contributed to this report.
Copyright 2004 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Associated Press contributed to this report.
