Rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, are a favorite weapon of insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are cheap, easy to use and deadly.
Sixteen months ago, commanders in Iraq began asking the Pentagon for a new system to counter RPGs and other anti-tank weapons.
Last year, a special Pentagon unit thought it found a solution in Israel - a high-tech system that shoots RPGs out of the sky. But in a five-month exclusive investigation, NBC News has learned from Pentagon sources that that help for U.S. troops is now in serious jeopardy.
The system is called "Trophy," and it is designed to fit on top of tanks and other armored vehicles like the Stryker now in use in Iraq.
Trophy works by scanning all directions and automatically detecting when an RPG is launched. The system then fires an interceptor - traveling hundreds of miles a minute - that destroys the RPG safely away from the vehicle.
The Israeli military, which recently lost a number of tanks and troops to RPGs, is rushing to deploy the system.
And officials with the Pentagon"s Office of Force Transformation (OFT) agree. Created in 2001 by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, OFT acts as an internal "think tank" for the Pentagon and is supposed to take a more entrepreneurial - and thereby less bureaucratic - approach to weapons procurement and other defense issues, and to get help to troops in the field more quickly. OFT officials subjected Trophy to 30 tests and found that it is "more than 98 percent" effective at killing RPGs.
An official involved with those tests told NBC that Trophy "worked in every case. The only anomaly was that in one test, the Trophy round hit the RPG's tail instead of its head. But according to our test criteria, the system was 30 for 30."
As a result, OFT decided to buy several Trophies - which cost $300,000-$400,000 each - for battlefield trials on Strykers in Iraq next year.
That plan immediately ran into a roadblock: Strong opposition from the U.S. Army. Why? Pentagon sources tell NBC News that the Army brass considers the Israeli system a threat to an Army program to develop an RPG defense system from scratch.
The $70 million contract for that program had been awarded to an Army favorite, Raytheon. Raytheon's contract constitutes a small but important part of the Army's massive modernization program called the Future Combat System (FCS), which has been under fire in Congress on account of ballooning costs and what critics say are unorthodox procurement practices.
Col. Donald Kotchman, who heads the Army's program to develop an RPG defense, acknowledges that Raytheon's system won't be ready for fielding until 2011 at the earliest.
So why would the Army block a solution that might help troops?
"There are some in the Army who would be extremely concerned that if the Trophy system worked, then the Army would have no need to go forward with the Raytheon system and the program might be terminated," says Steven Schooner, who teaches procurement law at both George Washington University and the Army's Judge Advocate General's School.
Trophy's supporters inside the Pentagon are more blunt. As one senior official told NBC News, "This debate has nothing, zero, to do with capability or timeliness. It's about money and politics. You've got a gigantic program [FCS] and contractors with intertwined interests. Trophy was one of the most successful systems we've tested, and yet the Army has ensured that it won't be part of FCS and is now trying to prevent it from being included on the Strykers" that OFT planned to send to Iraq.
Once again, the troops are getting screwed and will die for corporate profit and future fat jobs for lifer pricks.
Maybe the kids who are in the 8th grade now will get the weapon when it's their turn in the meat grinder of Iraq.
This makes me so mad I can't see straight.
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