Get Politics and Pork Out of Government and the Military!

It matters not what your feeling is about whether or not we should be in Iraq, or what is happening in Afghanistan, or what is possibly go to happen down the line in Syria and Iran (though let me say that so long as Western PTB and PTWannaB continue to treat Muslim psychopaths and other fundamentalists as if they can be reasoned with, well, we ARE going to be involved on the ground and in the air), the fact that we are sending our men and women into combat and terrorist areas without outfitting them with proven armor and weapons is insane, not to speak of costly, both in terms of lives lost and lives irrevocably altered through severe dismemberment and lifelong disability.

When I first heard about the Army blocking the Pentagon's order for several of Israel's Trophy anti-RPG systems because the Army, in cahoots with Rayethon, had an anti-RPG system in the planning and design stages, a system which won't be ready until at least 2011, while Trophy is ready to install NOW, I was mightily pissed. (Army shuns system to combat RPGs)

That was several months ago. When the Army claimed that Trophy was not yet ready, not as effective as claimed, NBC continued to investigate, and found that not only had the Army lied, but that other US military personnel were bullied and ordered to screw up the US military testing and falsify the results.

The only people benefiting from this are Rayethon, already getting billions as one of the US defense contractors, and the upper echelon military and federal government personnel who will ultimately be employed by Rayethon and other such contractors through the good ol' boy network. Such refusal to install and put into service a system that is 90+ percent effective and available NOW puts the lives of servicemembers at risk, the outcomes of which will ripple throughout their families and communities for years to come.

One of the theories floating around about why this decision was made is that why pay for and install Trophy if we are going to be exiting Iraq anytime soon. How blooding effin' short-sighted do you have to be to not see that RPGs in enemy and terrorist hands are here to stay, regardless of whether the US troops they are shooting at are in Iraq or any other place where the locals love attacking us as much as they enjoy slaughtering each other?

That's as short-sighted--and too often lethal or permanently disabling--as not providing properly cushioned and strapped helmet liners to all military personal deployed to countries where they are likely to be shot at, blown up by RPGs and IEDs, or otherwise subjected to forces that can cause severe brain damage, assuming they survive the attack?

Frankly, I think the Army brains lying about Trophy should be busted down to private and sent to Baghdad. Perhaps then they'd start to see why it is more important to get a working system in place now, while their engineers and designers back home continue to design and try to manufacturer a better system, instead of hoping like hell that they produce a system at least as good and ready to deploy in 2011 as Trophy is right now.