MRAP, Saving Lives, and Victory

In Foreign Affairs magazine recently, there was a highly critical piece about MRAP, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles that are used to protect our troops from IEDs.  Basically
it says the DoD numbers on 40,000 lives saved are a major overstretch of bureaucratic
estimating.  The authors seem to believe that the Defense Department basically wrote up every passenger in any MRAP that was attacked as a life saved. Well, that's an interesting argument, and may bear review.  The authors, a couple of economics professors - one at the Naval Postgraduate School - say that the US spent $45 Billion on MRAP, and that is just too much money - by golly, it is almost as much as the entire Homeland Defense Department budget.  Aside from the crassness of putting dollar signs on the human lives saved by the program, it is another example of the no-win position we love to put our nation's decision makers into. Have the professors forgotten that Americans were being blasted by IEDs and RPGs in their HUMMVs? Have they forgotten the outcry to "do something?"

The fact is, MRAP was a reaction to a terrible situation. Could it have been done cheaper? Maybe. It is rare to see a weapons system procured, fielded, and thrown into combat simultaneously. Usually a newly developed weapon or vehicle is tested and prototyped and tested some more.  By the time it is fielded, it is drawing criticism for being over tested as a way to put cash in contractors pockets.  The AAMRAM missile was being tested in the late 1970's when I was a cadet; it was fielded just in time for Desert Storm in 1991.  So you can't win with the critics.

But there is a more fundamental question in the fielding of the MRAP.  If we had lost even a few thousand more lives in Iraq or Afghanistan, the nation would have been forced to ask a different set of foreign and military policy questions about the utility of the war, and the value of the cause.  It seems highly doubtful that we would have become more ferocious, more willing to hunt down and kill the enemy with the annihilative will to win the war decisively, thereby ending the IED threat through a bloody pound-the-enemy-into-submission response.  Thus, one could argue that MRAP
prolongs a war that we don't seem determined to win any more, thereby costing lives a few at a time by its existence.

What our leaders have done is put our troops into a safer cocoon while they continue the temporizing "nation-building" policies that have taken the place of winning wars, punishing our enemies, and protecting America first and foremost. We won't pull out and we won't destroy the enemy so all that is left is protecting the people we send to do this thankless job. Meanwhile, the politicians all pat themselves on the back for protecting the troops, never once asking the "why" question, why are we there and what do we expect to gain from our efforts: What are our troops' lives worth, not in dollars, but in terms of the causes we send them forward in, when we see them forward for us.