November 30th, 2002
CBS.com
As the Pentagon girds for possible military action against Iraq, it
is having problems providing U.S. troops with state-of-the-art protective
gear against chemical and biological attacks, according to lawmakers from
both parties cited in the Washington Post's Saturday editions.
The lawmakers' worries have been buttressed by the General Accounting
Office, which recently reported "continuing concerns" about equipment,
training and research. The GAO said that for six years, "we have identified
many problems in the Defense Department's capabilities to defend against
chemical and biological weapons and sustain operations in the midst of
their use."
Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), chairman of the Government Reform
Committee's national security subcommittee, told the Post the latest problem
Pentagon officials uncovered involves gas masks that have the wrong gaskets
and will require extensive inspections to ensure that they are functioning
properly.
Shays said he is also concerned about the Defense Department's inability
to manage millions of protective suits so that units likely to deploy to
the Persian Gulf receive the highest-quality gear, with 250,000 defective
suits unaccounted for in the Pentagon inventory.
"I visited the troops in Europe, who I believe will be first responders
in Iraq, and they did not have the best equipment we have, and that is
a concern to me," Shays said. "We don't know where some of our best suits
are -- they are God knows where. And in some cases, we've mixed bad inventory
with good," the newspaper quotes Shays as saying.
Raymond Decker, the GAO's director of defense capabilities and management,
said he was not convinced that the Pentagon had enough new, highly protective,
lightweight suits to equip all forces likely to fight a war in Iraq.
With the new suits in relatively short supply, Decker said to the Post,
the Pentagon must rely on millions of older suits manufactured since 1989.
But the quality of those charcoal-lined garments, he said, diminishes with
age.
A Capitol Hill source, who asked not to be named, said recent Pentagon
tests had revealed that the older suits are good for only a day or two
after they are removed from their protective packaging. If additional testing
turns up similar results, the Post source said, "they've got a big problem."
The GAO told Shays's subcommittee in October that the Pentagon could
not locate 250,000 defective suits manufactured since 1989 by a New York
company called Isratex, whose officers have been convicted of intentionally
providing the military with defective garments. An additional 530,000 defective
suits produced by the firm have been located and removed from military
stocks.
In a letter sent Wednesday to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a member
of Shays's subcommittee, Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky (D-Ill.), cited "extremely
troubling" testimony by his subordinates on chemical and biological preparedness,
particularly with regard to the 250,000 defective suits still missing,
the Post points out.
The threat to U.S. forces is particularly acute as the Bush administration
puts the finishing touches on invasion plans to topple Iraqi President
Saddam Hussein if his government does not relinquish its nuclear, chemical
and biological weapons and fully cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors.
The CIA says Iraq most likely has stockpiled "a few hundred metric tons
of chemical warfare agents," including the nerve agents VX, sarin, cyclosarin
and mustard gas, and also possesses anthrax and other lethal biological
agents that could be weaponized.
Iraq did not use chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces
during the Gulf War, even though Hussein ordered commanders to fill Scud
missile warheads, bombs and artillery shells with chemical agents. But
many analysts say Hussein and his most loyal commanders will not hesitate
to use them in another war, because this new military campaign would be
for the explicit purpose of toppling Hussein's government.
Anna Johnson-Winegar, the Defense Department's deputy assistant secretary
for chemical and biological defense, told the Post she believed the Pentagon
would be able to reach a "goal" for providing all troops sent to the Gulf
with the new protective suits, officially named the Joint Service Lightweight
Integrated Suit Technology, or JSLIST, suits.
Johnson-Winegar also said recent tests had given defense officials "complete
confidence" in the protective capabilities of the JSLIST suits and the
older garments.
Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division
during the Gulf War and is under Pentagon contract to brief the commanders
of units likely to deploy on what to expect in any military action against
Iraq, said he believed that U.S. forces were well prepared for chemical
or biological attacks.
"Every fighter wing, every Navy ship at sea, every Army battalion is
fully equipped to fight in a chemical environment," McCaffrey said to the
Post. He underscored the threat last month when he told commanders of the
3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Ga., that they should expect to
be attacked with chemical weapons.
The U.S. military's preparedness for chemical and biological warfare
has greatly improved since the Gulf War, when 100,000 troops were exposed
to trace levels of sarin nerve gas when engineers blew up sarin-filled
rockets at a munitions dump in Khamisiyah in March 1991, the Post reports.
In addition to the new protective suits and masks, U.S. forces are equipped
with armored M-93 Fox vehicles that detect mustard gas and nerve agents
on the battlefield in less than a second, sounding alarms that give soldiers
time to climb into protective suits, masks, boots and gloves. Military
units also surround their bases with M8 alarms to detect the presence of
nerve agents.
The Pentagon has also recently installed 52 stationary biological sensors
called Portal Shield in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the United Arab Emirates
and Bahrain to complement a mobile biological sensing system towed by a
Humvee that is designed to patrol the battlefield and provide early warning
of a biological attack.
But unlike chemical sensors, biological sensors take as long as 20 minutes
to detect the presence of germ weapons, greatly increasing the risk that
soldiers would be exposed to biological agents before donning their protective
gear.
Even the Pentagon's new JSLIST garment and M40 silicone rubber gas mask
cannot stop some biological agents and a powdered version of VX nerve agent
called "Dusty VX," the Post says.
One difficulty in assessing the Pentagon's readiness in the chemical
and biological arena is that much information about the protective qualities
of the new equipment remains classified, the Post explains.
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