美軍防地雷反伏擊車首次致命遇襲事件
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/22/world/middleeast/22vehicle.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Hopes for Vehicle Questioned After Iraq Blast
By STEPHEN FARRELL
Published: January 22, 2008
ARAB JABOUR, Iraq — From the blast and the high, thin plume of white smoke above the tree line, it looked and sounded like any other attack. The bare details were, sadly, routine enough: a gunner was killed and three crew members were wounded Saturday when their vehicle rolled over a homemade bomb buried beneath a road southeast of Baghdad.
Yet, it was anything but routine. Over a crackling field radio came reports of injuries and then, sometime later, official confirmation of the first fatality inflicted by a roadside bomb on an MRAP, the new Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected armored vehicle that the American military is counting on to reduce casualties from roadside bombs in Iraq.
The military has been careful to point out that the new vehicle is not impervious to attack, and that a sufficiently powerful bomb can destroy any vehicle. Still, a forensic team was flown in immediately to inspect the charred wreckage, from which wires and tangled metal protruded, to determine whether the bombing had revealed a design flaw.
“It’s a great vehicle, but there is no perfect vehicle,” said Lt. Col. Kenneth Adgie, commander of the battalion that lost the soldier.
Three of the four people aboard suffered only broken feet and lacerations. Pending the results of an investigation, it is unclear yet whether the gunner was killed by the blast or by the vehicle rolling over.
But officers on the scene noted that he was the member of the crew most exposed, and that the vehicle’s secure inner compartment was not compromised and appeared to have done its job by protecting the three other crew members inside. “The crew compartment is intact,” said Capt. Michael Fritz. He said the blast would have been large enough “to take out” a heavily armored Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Roadside bombs have been the single deadliest weapon insurgents have directed against American forces in Iraq, and have grown increasingly sophisticated and powerful over the years. As a result, reducing the carnage from the bombs became a strong military and political imperative for the Bush administration.
So important is the mine-resistant vehicle to the United States military that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates singled it out in his holiday-season message in December, saying, “To ensure that troops have the best protection available on the battlefield, MRAPs became the military’s highest acquisition priority, and thousands of these vehicles are in production and en route to theater.”
On Friday, Mr. Gates toured an assembly facility for the vehicles in Charleston, S.C., where he described them as “a proven lifesaver on the battlefield.” He cited Army reports that there had been 12 attacks on the vehicles with homemade bombs since a push began last summer to send more of them into combat zones, mostly in Iraq. No soldiers died in those attacks, he said.
The vehicles have distinctive, armored V-shaped hulls that are designed to deflect the force of the explosion from roadside bombs out and away from the vehicle, sparing the occupants in the compartment.
The underbody sits about 36 inches off the ground, higher than the Humvees that have proved susceptible to roadside bombs despite the additional armor added to many of them in combat zones.
The vehicles are much bigger than Humvees, standing 12 feet high, weighing up to 18 tons, and carrying 6 to 10 soldiers, depending on the model. There are more than 1,500 of them in Iraq now, and the military plans to purchase more than 15,000 of them at a cost of $22.4 billion.
Saturday’s deadly attack came on the first day of an operation to clear insurgents from southern Arab Jabour, a rural, overwhelmingly Sunni area less than 10 miles southeast of Baghdad on the Tigris River. The primary target is Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown extremist group that American intelligence says is foreign led.
The bomb went off at 4:45 p.m., as engineers were driving beside an irrigation ditch to support soldiers of the First Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, Second Brigade Combat Team, Third Infantry Division, who had been clearing farmhouses and villages since a dawn air assault. The blast threw the vehicle into the air and spun it 180 degrees, with its shattered nose coming to rest beside the ditch.
Pvt. Matthew Hall, 19, saw the bombing while standing on the roof of a nearby farmhouse. “I heard a loud boom,” he said Sunday. “I looked over and I saw pieces of vehicle and smoke. I saw a tire flying into the field.”
Several vehicles in the convoy had already passed over the same spot, but failed to set off what officers say they was a deeply buried, homemade bomb, which the military calls an improvised explosive device, or I.E.D., made from about 300 pounds of fertilizer and set off with a pressure device.
Infantrymen who had spent the day carefully maneuvering on foot through fields and ditches heard the blast and saw the smoke.
“That was another I.E.D.,” said Capt. John Newman, the commander of Company B, to groans from his men who had walked close to the blast site earlier that morning.
Two minutes later came another report. “It was an MRAP, totally destroyed,” the radio operator said.
Two rescue helicopters arrived minutes later to evacuate the wounded.
Dismayed, their colleagues carried on with their patrols, detaining insurgent suspects and searching for other bombs in farmyards and vehicles.
The threat from buried bombs was well known before of the operation. To help clear the ground, the military had dropped nearly 100,000 pounds of bombs to destroy weapons caches and I.E.D.’s.
Colonel Adgie, the battalion commander, stressed that the full details of the attacked vehicle’s destruction would not be known until an investigation was completed, but said initial examination suggested a “deep-buried I.E.D.,” which was there for some time, rather than one set off by remote control.
Commanders had received intelligence about a bomb buried there, he said, but could not be certain about the report, and were unable to explode or find it despite repeated attempts from the air, and with metal detectors.
He said many of the devices were hard to find and could be set off by a vehicle moving over them at a slightly different spot or at a different angle than previous vehicles had.
“We had cleared it once and cleared it a second time,” he said. “A lot of vehicles had gone over it already, and it was the second-to-last vehicle that got hit. You try your best to find them and roll them up, but we didn’t find that one.”
Rear Adm. Greg Smith, a spokesman for the American military in Baghdad, confirmed that the attack was “the first death resulting from an I.E.D. attack on an MRAP,” but said that he could not comment on specific damage to the vehicle “for force protection reasons.”
Admiral Smith said the new vehicle had proven “in its short time here in Iraq that it is a much improved vehicle in protecting troops from the effects of improvised explosive devices.”
“However,” he added, “there is no vehicle that can provide absolute protection of its occupants.”
A few hours before the explosion, Captain Newman’s company was led by a farmer to a similarly large device nearby. It was safely detonated.
Captain Newman said that his battalion had been using the new vehicles for about two months, and that this was the first time one had been hit with a bomb.
“Unfortunately we knew our time would probably come,” he said. “It was just a very, very big amount of explosives. You can break anything with a big enough hammer.”
That sentiment was echoed by other soldiers in the area.
“Before this, lots of soldiers thought the MRAP was indestructible, but nothing is indestructible,” Specialist Matthew Gregg, 24, an MRAP gunner, said after driving past the wreckage. “To drive past it three or four times now, it reminds you that everything is unpredictable out here.”
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