Army Cannot Keep Up With Demand for Vehicle Replacement Parts in Iraq

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Army overcame enormous logistics obstacles in the successful march to Baghdad last spring, but sustaining the force has become a problem, a senior Army general said Friday.

Gen. Paul Kern, chief of the Army Materiel Command, cited as an example the Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, which he said has sustained so much wear and tear in Iraq that the Army is months' short of replacements for the steel tracks on which they travel.

Kern said the Army also is in short supply of replacement tracks for Abrams tanks, Paladin howitzers and other vehicles. snip

"We haven't closed down Afghanistan, we've still got people operating in the Balkans, and I've got my eye on Korea," he said. "So we can't take all the resources of the U.S. Army and send them all to Iraq."

Asked whether U.S. officials had anticipated at the outset of the Iraq war that the postwar stabilization phase would last so long and require so many troops, Kern said, "Some did. Some didn't."

He acknowledged that the military underestimated what it would take to sustain the force in Iraq.

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