Christian Lowe has an excellent piece on THE DAILY STANDARD today about the MRAP’s rapid fall from grace. Under the title “Another Casualty of the Surge,” Christian writes:
The WWS hopped on the MRAP bandwagon pretty early on, but by late spring we were already starting to look for the exits as the cost of the program ballooned and Congress made the vehicles into a political sledge hammer with which to beat on the Bush administration. At its high point, Congress was talking of spending upwards of $20 billion on the program, with Joe Biden leading the charge. But now that the surge has vastly reduced American casualties, and Anbar province hasn’t seen an American killed by IED in more than three months, these vehicles are rightly being reassessed as a niche tool for ordnance disposal and the clearing of major transportation routes. And while I’ve debated this issue with a number of folks, in particular Roggio, who seems to think that American troops are pretty eager to get their hands on the things, Michael Yon recently wrote that the troops may be having second thoughts as well:
In any event, there’s clearly been a decision within the Pentagon to slow things down a bit, and that seems like the right move to me–although the companies that make these things are reeling. Force Protection, which makes the Buffalo MRAP (pictured in Christian’s story), has seen its share price drop 50 percent since Monday.
